After the dismissal, on April 24th, of Tucker Carlson, his ultra-trumpean television presenter of listening champions (probably a consequence of the plea agreement with Dominion to which he had to pay an indemnity of 787 million dollars for the damages caused by the false information transmitted across America), the Fox News network has tried to avoid hemorrhaging right-wing viewers by escalating attacks on the now systematically captioned Joe Biden when he appears on screen, like a senile leader who does not know what he is saying or, even, suffering from dementia: the greatest world power in the hands of an incompetent. However, when on Tuesday, under the image of the president giving a speech at the White House, the writing appeared «would-be dictator who has just obtained the arrest of his political opponent»even in the network of the arch conservative Rupert Murdoch someone must have said that enough is enough: it is one thing to support Trump and attack or mock the Democrats, it is quite another to treat a legitimate president as the dictator of a banana republic which claims to have left full autonomy to the judicial bodies which in turn have appointed a formally independent special prosecutor.
After the television incident went around the world (even Corriere reported it on various of its channels) and outraged half of America, the Fox has fired Alex McCaskill, the producer author of the “girth”.
McCaskill, who was part of Carlson’s team, confirmed that he has left the network: «They were the best ten years of my career but everything ends» he wrote, while an image on Instagram portrays him with the classic box in his hands as he leaves the Fox headquarters.
He had asked for two weeks to give the feeling of voluntary resignation, but he had to empty his desk in a few hours while the network, having recognized the error, now says that the defamatory writing was immediately removed and the problem addressed and resolved.
But in the era of digital networks those few minutes were enough to make an image of a network go viral everywhere which, however successful, is seen by 2 of the 334 million Americans. And the use that will be made of the case by the American ultra-right is already clear from the monologue with which Tucker Carlson defended his former collaborator on Twitter. Whose tendency to resort to colorful and, to say the least, controversial expressions, had already emerged at the time of Carlson’s dismissal on which the complaint for sexist behavior by another former producer, Abby Grossberg, probably also weighed. In the complaint to the judiciary, Grossberg also quotes McCaskill saying that when Fox allocated a room to breastfeeding women, he called it wasted space: “That room should instead be given to males who want to tan their balls”.