ATith a show with more than 3 million viewers, airing daily on Fox News, Tucker Carlson seemed unassailable. Despite – or perhaps thanks to – his provocations, his repeated racist and sexist outbursts, or even the “ fake news » he struck on the screen, the presenter was, for more than a decade, one of the stars of the conservative and conspiratorial American channel. But on April 24, the 50-year-old was fired.
A departure announced less than a week after the chain reached an almost $800 million agreement with Dominion Voting Systems, an American brand of voting machines, following their libel suit for spreading lies about 2020 presidential election results, disputed by Donald Trump. The investigation proved that the channel, which has become essential in the polarized political landscape of the United States, knowingly lied to its viewers.
The Fox News Channel, created by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, appears for the first time in The world on October 6, 1996, shortly after its launch. The journalist Claudine Mulard then announces a ” war “ continuous information, between CNN, its competitor MSNBC and this new channel, offered to 10 million American households and whose slogan was then: “Balanced and Neutral” (“fair and balanced”). Ted Turner, the director of CNN, prefers to publicly compare the ambitions of the founder of Fox News to those of the Führer of the IIIe Reich, Adolf Hitler.
“Rapid product”
Through this provocation, he wishes to denounce the conservative tendency of the new channel: Roger Ailes, its director, was the communications adviser to Republican presidents Richard Nixon and then Ronald Reagan and, in 1994, billionaire Rupert Murdoch personally gave $100,000 to the New York office of the Republican Party.
This orientation enables them to transform continuous information into “flashy product”describes Eric Leser in August 2001. Even if it means taking risks with the facts, according to the newspaper’s correspondent in New York: “The channel, which is very close to the Republicans, was the first to announce, on the night of November 7 to 8, 2000, then wrongly, the victory of George W. Bush in the presidential election. »
The attacks of September 11, 2001 upset the United States and its way of doing journalism. Geraldo Rivera, Fox News war correspondent, “carries a gun under his jacket” during a report in Afghanistan, begins Annick Cojean, in December 2001. The journalist often strikes a pose on a tank or in the desert, and plans to kill the terrorist Osama Bin Laden: “I would take his head home and cast it in bronze,” he declares. The channel lets him do it and even encourages him. Because, for the special envoy of the World, it’s time for “beliefs” and at “patriotism” on the conservative channel.
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