If you believe in responsibility, if you believe in personal responsibility, if you believe that wrongdoings deserve punishment and those who knowingly lie must pay for their dishonor and deceit, then Monday was a good day

Tucker Carlson, the racist, immigrant-hating, election-denying, Putin-promoting, two-headed ringmaster of right-wing sophistry, was unceremoniously dumped by his corporate sponsor, Fox News.

Let the joyful news spread!

If you believe that his ouster will usher in another day of sunshine and brotherhood across the land, heal our divisions, and unite red and blue Americans, then you are probably as gullible as the Fox viewers who routinely diet of misconceptions and nonsense. fueled by Carlson and other insincere Fox hosts.

It’s not going to happen.

As odious and treacherous as he was, Carlson was only a symptom, albeit a major propagator of the toxicity that plagues our politics and culture today.

Its removal from a prime-time slot of televisions eliminates a major source of air pollution. But it doesn’t change the mindset, the corporate drive for profit at any cost, or the end of the kind of deliberate mendacity that has made Carlson one of Fox’s biggest celebrities and a kingmaker in today’s late-night Republican Party.

Lest it be forgotten, Carlson replaced Bill OReilly, another top-rated star, who dealt in distortion and deception when OReilly got caught up in one of the network’s serial sexual harassment scandals.

Unless Fox jettisons its business model and overlord Rupert Murdoch registers as a Democrat, Carlson will no doubt be replaced by a host just as willing to serve up the same noxious concoction of sedition, spin, and fabricated stuff to an audience that craves it.

On the propaganda network where not a discouraging word is ever heard.

One of the most surprising revelations from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox, which last week resulted in a payout of nearly $800 million, that how many of the network’s on-air personalities, Carlson, knew was the allegations of a stolen election were false . They continued to promote the lie because they believed this was what their audience wanted to hear, truth and journalistic ethics be damned.

The insight one can take from the Dominion revelations is that Fox News has focused on satisfying existing needs and catering to the desires of a grassroots, niche audience and has done so successfully, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor from the University of Pennsylvania and one of the nation’s leading scholars of politics and the news media.

And when threatened” with viewer loss, she noted, the network and its hosts deliberately misled them “to protect its interest in controlling that space.

Amply demonstrating Fox News’ corporate credo of market share

above all

.

Carlson’s defenestration happened to coincide with Don Lemon’s firing from CNN, and since what-about-ism is today’s reflexive fallback, let’s briefly touch on Lemon’s firing.

He made a stupid, sexist comment about Nikki Haley, the 51-year-old former governor of South Carolina seeking the GOP presidential nomination, who was past her prime. It also didn’t help that Lemon didn’t catch on as a “CNN This Morning” co-host.

But nothing Lemon said compares to the long, reprehensible list of cruel and hateful statements Carlson spewed out. Those include attacks on immigrants that, he suggested, make America poorer and dirtier with anti-Semitic and white supremacist tropes and a suggestion, in the midst of the pandemic, that viewers call the police or child services if they see a child playing outside and a wearing mask.

There could have been a grin and wink when Carlson made such blatantly exaggerated remarks. But there was nothing funny about how some in his audience reacted.

In one extreme case, the grand replacement theory promoted by Carlson was cited by a gunman who killed 10 people and wounded three others in a grocery store in a mostly black Buffalo neighborhood in May 2022.

Multitudes of academic studies have also documented the damaging “Fox News” effect on viewers who showed themselves to be more misinformed or believed proven falsehoods, pushing congressional lawmakers toward more far-right, uncompromising positions.

It is too much to blame a single individual, despicable as Carlson may be, for leading an entire country to a

a wave of anger, backbiting, blame and distrust.

But there is something particularly repugnant about someone who was not only willing and eager to contribute to that poisoned atmosphere, but did so knowing that he was promoting a dangerous and explosive series of lies.

In private, Carlson called the allegations that Dominion stole President Trump’s election “shockingly reckless” and “absurd.” On the broadcast, he spoon-fed them to his gullible audience with a deadpan face.

Carlson’s humiliating resignation won’t cure everything that’s wrong with this country. Yet it is satisfying.