They say three makes a trend and US television was convulsed last week by a trio of scandals and sudden sackings that cast a harsh spotlight on a too often toxic workplace culture that floods the top echelons of TV land in America as surely as the fill-in lights of a broadcast studio.
It also helped cost the jobs of three of the biggest names in the media landscape as well as convulsing some of the most powerful media empires in America.
The first head to roll, at midday on Monday, was the powerful rightwinger Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s 8pm primetime chieftain, who was suddenly ditched from his prominent perch at the network in a move that roiled the worlds of politics and media alike.
Carlson had shown hints of dissatisfaction some weeks before his execution, telling the podcast Full Send podcast that the media were “part of the control apparatus” and he had spent his “whole life being part of the problem”.
“For too long I participated in the culture of anyone who thinks outside of pre-prescribed lanes is a crazy person, and I really regret doing that,” he said.
Those comments came as a discrimination lawsuit was being readied by Abby Grossberg, Carlson’s former booker, that cast a brutal spotlight on the internal culture of Carlson’s show and some of its top executives.
Grossberg had been fired by Fox News shortly after she filed two lawsuits against the company in March claiming that Fox News, Fox Corp and employees including Carlson fostered a workplace rife with abusive behaviors, that included claims of bullying, antisemitism and sexism.
Grossberg claims she was “isolated, overworked, undervalued, denied opportunities for promotion, and generally treated significantly worse than her male counterparts, even when those men were less qualified than her”.
No comparable lawsuit is known to shroud Don Lemon, fired by CNN an hour after Carlson. Lemon never had Carlson’s audience draw, but his behavior clearly tested management and co-workers. Most notoriously he had made sexist on-air comments about when women might be considered in their “prime”.
As his termination approached, he had reportedly been refused a sit-down with the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, and had aggressively spoken over the Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to the evident embarrassment of co-host Poppy Harlow.
Lemon’s termination was seen as the culmination of a longstanding pattern of behavior that had created a difficult workplace atmosphere. But nor was it CNN’s first. While on prime time, Lemon had developed a strong on-air relationship with fellow host Chris Cuomo. But Cuomo was first suspended, then terminated, for violating journalistic ethics when he helped his brother, the then New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, navigate sexual harassment allegations against him.
The third firing happened outside news. The NBCUniversal CEO, Jeff Shell, announced he was to depart because of “an inappropriate relationship with a woman in the company”. The woman – Abu Dhabi-based CNBC correspondent Hadley Gamble – had filed a complaint, reportedly after learning that her contract was not going to be renewed. Shell and Gamble were reportedly involved from 2012 to 2021.
In a statement, Gamble’s attorney said that she had lodged a complaint against Shell for sexual harassment and sex discrimination. Shell, who was fired for cause, will forfeit more than $43m in stock grants and options, according to a regulatory filling by parent Comcast.
Shell had steered the company through the firing of the newscaster Matt Lauer, who was accused of raping an NBC News employee at the Sochi Olympics, and the later firing Ron Meyer, an NBCUniversal executive who claimed to have been a victim of extortion after helping a British actor with whom he had had a consensual affair.
Robert Thompson, a media studies professor at Syracuse University cautions that there’s “no grand unified theory” to where television is going from the three high-profile exits.
“What unifies them is inappropriate behavior. This goes back generations and regimes as if this behavior is built-in like a property for people in power,” he said.
“For the people who are victims of these things this a serious workplace environment issue, same as if you had asbestos coming from the ceilings. This is its own kind of cultural asbestos.”
But the reaction to Carlson’s firing – “part ways”, in Fox speak – may be more interesting than the event itself.
Fox spokespeople were keen to let it be known that Carlson, on an estimated $20m salary, was not a big rainmaker for the company. A series of advertiser boycotts limited the ad buy around his show; it was not swathed in luxury car ads like The Five. Without major brand support, Carlson’s show generated just 7% of Fox News’s total $479m in ad revenue in the first quarter, according to MediaRadar.
But it got viewers, often more than 3 million a night, and with them came political power and influence. Without Carlson, those viewers are now fleeing. By Wednesday, Fox News viewers during Carlson’s old 8pm time slot had dropped by more than half.
At the same time, a two-minute Twitter monologue posted by Carlson at 8pm on Wednesday was viewed 70m times in 24 hours.
“If there was ever any question that Tucker Carlson was delivering an act designed to maximize his audience, the Dominion emails demonstrated it,” says Thompson.
On the other side, Lemon’s problem was that he said what he believed, and sometimes with a striking lack of delicacy. “If he was only delivering what he thought his audience or management wanted, he was operating in an environment where new management have new ideas,” Thompson adds.
Michael Hanmer at the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland says the amplification by social media of info-entertainment voices like those of Carlson and to a lesser extent Lemon speaks to a complicated media environment.
In late 2021, the center published a study with the Washington Post looking at how partisan attitudes had shifted in the year since the attack on the US Capitol and found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that they had not.
“When you have competing sides in the media and it becomes loud and visibly angry, that sends a signal. It becomes acceptable to jump into debates with an angrier tone or push an argument rather than have a discussion,” he point out. “It’s certainly more entertaining to see disagreement, but if we accept the business model is to get ratings and ad dollars, then it’s working to some extent.”
