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      Fox News Gambled, but Tucker Carlson Can Still Take Down the House

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      For the quarter-century-plus that the Fox News Channel has been coming into America’s living rooms, it has operated according to a cardinal tenet: No one at the cable network is bigger than Fox News itself. It’s a lesson Glenn Beck, Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly all learned the hard way after they left Fox and saw their fame and influence (if not their fortunes) evaporate. Once the biggest names in cable news, they now spend their days wandering in the wilderness of podcasts and third-tier streaming platforms. Even Roger Ailes, Fox News’s original architect and the man who devised — and then ruthlessly enforced — the no-one-bigger-than rule, discovered that he was expendable when Rupert Murdoch pushed him out as Fox’s chairman and chief executive in 2016 amid sexual harassment allegations. Mr. Ailes soon disappeared to a mansion in Florida and, less than a year later, died in exile from the media world he’d once commanded.When Fox News abruptly fired Tucker Carlson, the network’s most popular prime-time host and the most powerful person in conservative media, many savvy press critics predicted the same fate for him: professional oblivion. Mr. Carlson had himself once replaced Ms. Kelly, and later Mr. O’Reilly, and each time he climbed to a new, better slot in the Fox News lineup he garnered bigger and bigger ratings. Now, according to the conventional wisdom, some new up-and-comer would inherit Mr. Carlson’s audience and replace him as the king (or queen) of conservative media. “The ‘talent’ at the Fox News Channel has never been the star,” Politico’s Jack Shafer wrote earlier this week. “Fox itself, which convenes the audience, is the star.”But there’s good reason to believe Mr. Carlson will be the exception that proves the rule. For one thing, unlike previous stars who have left Fox News, Mr. Carlson departed when he was still at the height of his power, making his firing all the more sudden and shocking. Three days before his sacking, he gave the keynote address at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala. Two weeks before that, he browbeat Texas’ Republican governor to issue a pardon to a man who had been convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in Austin.More important, at Fox, he exercised power in ways that were new and unique for a cable star. He was a sophisticated political operator as much as he was a talented television host — to an astonishingly unsettling degree, as he continued to thrive while making racist and sexist comments and earning the praise of neo-Nazis. Like Donald Trump — to say nothing of other Republican politicians and conservative media figures — he gave voice to an anger, sense of grievance and conspiratorial mind-set that resonated with many Americans, particularly those on the far right. Unlike Mr. Trump — not to mention his motley crew of cheerleaders and imitators — Mr. Carlson developed and articulated a coherent political ideology that could prove more lasting, and influential, than any cult of personality. Mr. Carlson has left Fox News. But his dark and outsize influence on the conservative movement — and on American politics — is hardly over.Tucker Carlson merchandise at the Heritage Foundation’s Leadership Summit on Friday, April 21. Mr. Carlson is leaving Fox at the height of his power. Leigh Vogel for The New York TimesWhen Mr. Carlson met with Mr. Ailes in 2009 to discuss a job at Fox News, Mr. Carlson’s career was at a nadir. He’d been let go from both CNN and MSNBC. He’d developed a game show pilot for CBS that wasn’t picked up. His stint on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” lasted just one episode. His finances were so stretched that he’d decided to sell his suburban New Jersey mansion out from under his wife and four children.“You’re a loser and you screwed up your whole life,” Mr. Ailes told Mr. Carlson, according to an account of the conversation Mr. Carlson later gave to his friend, the former Dick Cheney adviser Neil Patel. “But you have talent. And the only thing you have going for you is that I like hiring talented people who have screwed things up for themselves and learned a lesson, because once I do, you’re gonna work your ass off for me.”Mr. Carlson didn’t disappoint. Relegated to weekend morning show anchor duties, he threw himself into the job, participating in cooking segments with guests like Billy Ray Cyrus, competing against (and losing to) his female co-anchor in a Spartan Race and even subjecting himself to a dunk tank. He did it all with a smile, but, for a man who once hosted two prime-time cable news shows, as well as a highbrow talk show on the Public Broadcasting System, it had to have been humiliating. When his wife, Susie, sent an email in 2014 inviting some of Mr. Carlson’s Washington friends up to New York to celebrate his 45th birthday, she told guests they might “throw eggs at the FOX studio window!” (Since Hunter Biden was a friend of Mr. Carlson’s at the time and on the invite list, the email was later discovered on Mr. Biden’s laptop.)During his time as a host on “Fox and Friends,” Mr. Carlson’s contrarian streak curdled into resentment against “the elites” who took the country into Iraq, triggered the 2008 financial crisis and refused to give him a television role commensurate with his talents.Noam Galai/Getty ImagesMr. Carlson’s big break at Fox News arrived in 2016 in the form of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Although it’s hard to imagine now, Fox initially seemed intent on torpedoing Mr. Trump’s candidacy. So antagonistic were its hosts and commentators toward Mr. Trump in the early days of the 2016 race that it became a challenge for Fox to produce compelling television about the man who was dominating the G.O.P. field. No one — or at least no one Fox’s producers deemed camera-ready — seemed willing to make a sensible case for him.Enter Mr. Carlson. He’d nursed a soft spot for Mr. Trump ever since the early 2000s, when he made a throwaway joke on CNN about Mr. Trump’s hair and Mr. Trump responded with a blunt voice mail. “It’s true you have better hair than I do,” Mr. Carlson recalled Mr. Trump telling his answering machine. But, Mr. Trump said, with a vulgar boast, he had sex with more women. Mr. Carlson, who’d never met or spoken to Mr. Trump, was amused. More than a decade later, when Mr. Trump ran for president, he became intrigued. And it was that early openness to Mr. Trump’s candidacy that facilitated Mr. Carlson’s rise at Fox.Mr. Carlson had two motivations for not joining in the chorus denouncing Mr. Trump. One was ruthlessly strategic. Through the conservative website he launched with Mr. Patel in 2010, The Daily Caller, Mr. Carlson could see what got clicks: sensational articles about the twin scourges of illegal immigration and Black-on-white crime, plus slide shows of busty supermodels. The Caller’s web traffic metrics served as an early warning system for Mr. Carlson about where the conservative base was headed, and how a populist candidate who explicitly ran on nativism, white grievance and sexism might have a lane in a Republican primary.Mr. Carlson’s openness to Mr. Trump also had something to do with his own ideological journey. He started his career as a writer at The Weekly Standard, as a standard issue Reagan conservative, albeit one with a contrarian streak. The Iraq War, which he initially supported despite harboring doubts, hardened his heterodox views. Then, as his professional struggles mounted, his contrarianism curdled into resentment against “the elites” who took the country into Iraq, triggered the 2008 financial crisis and refused to give Mr. Carlson a television role commensurate with his talents. He paired his staple rep ties and Rolex with this new populist streak — and assumed the role of class traitor.That meant that in 2016, when most of his fellow conservative pundits still believed the G.O.P. needed to broaden its tent and so dismissed Mr. Trump out of hand, Mr. Carlson was able to recognize the potential appeal of the businessman turned reality-TV star turned populist politician. He was willing to say as much on air, which meant that Mr. Carlson began getting more and choicer opportunities at Fox to make the case that Mr. Trump should be taken seriously. Then, shortly after Mr. Trump’s election in November, as a reward of sorts for his prescience, Mr. Murdoch gave Mr. Carlson his own evening show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” By then, of course, Fox News was fully on board the Trump Train. Which is what made Mr. Carlson’s next move so interesting: He took a step off.At one point during Mr. Trump’s four years in the White House, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated show in the history of cable news, drawing over four million viewers on some evenings. But it was not a down-the-line, pro-Trump show. Each night, Mr. Carlson articulated a populist-nationalist ideology best described as Trumpism without Mr. Trump. He borrowed from (and sometimes, on his Fox Nation streaming show, even invited on air) “new right” intellectuals like the blogger Curtis Yarvin and the Claremont Institute fellow Michael Anton, smuggling their fringe ideas — about how the United States would work better as a monarchy, for instance — into the conservative mainstream. Indeed, Mr. Carlson himself often offered views that were more inflammatory and more extreme than the president’s — complaining that immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier and more divided,” for instance, and proclaiming that white supremacy was “a hoax.” A blog post on the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer celebrated: “Tucker Carlson is basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show.’ Other than the language used, he is covering all our talking points.”Mr. Carlson has already folded his firing into the apocalyptic worldview he’s so successfully promulgated these last few years.Max Oden/Sipa, via Associated PressAnd when Mr. Trump wasn’t willing to go as far as Mr. Carlson, Mr. Carlson wasn’t afraid to call Mr. Trump out. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020, he lambasted Mr. Trump for not cracking down harder on Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington and elsewhere. “If you can’t keep a Fox News correspondent from getting attacked directly across from your house, how can you protect my family?” Mr. Carlson said on his show. “How are you going to protect the country? How hard are you trying?” He was positioning himself, in opposition to Mr. Trump, as the vanguard of the American right. As Christopher Rufo, the ubiquitous conservative culture warrior whose own rise to prominence began with an appearance on Mr. Carlson’s show, once explained: “Tucker frames the narrative for conservative politics. Tucker doesn’t react to the news; he creates the news.”Mr. Carlson’s criticism of Mr. Trump and the wary distance he kept from him — sometimes even refusing to take his calls — made him that much more intriguing to the president. “Tucker was the hot girl that didn’t want to sleep with him,” says one former Trump White House official. “I think Trump was fascinated by this idea that ‘Everybody else is calling me. Why aren’t you calling me?’” Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as Mr. Trump’s White House communications director, recalls the president frequently fretting about getting on Mr. Carlson’s bad side. “He’d say, ‘Tucker’s crushing us, our base is going to leave us,’” Ms. Farah Griffin says. It was an acknowledgment from Mr. Trump that Mr. Carlson had become bigger than Fox.That certainly seemed to be the view inside the cable network. When Mr. Ailes ran Fox News, the pecking order was clear. If a host or reporter stepped out of line, Mr. Ailes would simply yank that person off the air, instructing producers to “show ’em the red light.” Mr. Carlson’s ascension at Fox occurred after Mr. Ailes’s departure from the network. The executive team that replaced him — the Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott and Rupert Murdoch’s son Lachlan, who’s the chief executive of the Fox Corporation — did not enforce as much discipline. Mr. Carlson repeatedly seemed to step over lines at Fox — endorsing the racist “great replacement theory,” circulating false conspiracy theories about Covid and Jan. 6, and attacking other Fox hosts on-air — only to have Fox execs then move the line. If Mr. Ailes was always goading disgruntled hosts to quit, telling them they would be nothing without Fox, Mr. Carlson seemed to be daring his bosses to fire him.After Mr. Trump went kicking and screaming from the White House (as well as from Twitter and Facebook), Mr. Carlson, still ensconced on Fox News and with unfettered access to social media, emerged as the far right’s standard-bearer in America’s culture wars, coming to occupy the same mental real estate — among both conservatives and liberals — that Mr. Trump once did. He was no longer just a cable host but a movement leader — working to bring the G.O.P. in line with his own views. On his show, he boosted ideological comrades like J.D. Vance, who shared Mr. Carlson’s skepticism about U.S. support of Ukraine in its war with Russia, gifting Mr. Vance hours of free airtime in the run-up to the Republican primary for the 2022 Ohio Senate race. Off-air, he personally lobbied Mr. Trump to give Mr. Vance his endorsement. At one point Mr. Carlson spent nearly two hours on FaceTime with Mr. Trump, while Mr. Trump golfed in Florida, making the case that Mr. Vance believed what Mr. Trump believed and that, were Mr. Trump to run for president again, he needed someone like Mr. Vance in the Senate. According to a person familiar with the call, Mr. Trump ended it by telling Mr. Carlson, “You’ll be happy.” A few weeks later, Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Vance, propelling him to the Republican nomination and, eventually, the Senate — one of the few 2022 bright spots for Republicans.As Mr. Carlson turned his attention toward the 2024 presidential race, his relationship with Mr. Trump, once again, became complicated. On the one hand, he was dead-set opposed to Nikki Haley, for whom he’d developed an intense personal dislike during an ill-fated hunting weekend about 10 years ago. (After Ms. Haley eventually launched her presidential candidacy in February, Mr. Carlson told his viewers, “Nikki Haley believes in collective racial guilt,” before going on to say, “She believes identity politics is our future. ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman,’ she says. That’s her pitch.”) On the other hand, Mr. Carlson, like many at Fox News — including Mr. Murdoch, who, in the wake of Jan. 6, told a former executive that Fox was seeking “to make Trump a nonperson” — appeared to be leaning toward the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, as a less erratic, more electable alternative to Mr. Trump. (In 2020, Mr. Carlson moved from Washington, D.C., to the small resort town of Boca Grande, Fla.)Sensing this, Mr. Trump tried to win back Mr. Carlson, but Mr. Carlson refused a sit-down. Finally, last July, Donald Trump Jr., with whom Mr. Carlson has become close, traveled to Mr. Carlson’s summer residence in rural Maine. There, according to people familiar with the visit, Mr. Trump Jr. pressed Mr. Carlson to meet with his father. A few weeks later, Mr. Carlson showed up at Mr. Trump’s Bedminster resort in New Jersey on the same weekend it was hosting the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour. The result was pictures of Mr. Carlson yukking it up with Mr. Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene in the tournament’s V.I.P. section.By keeping his distance from Mr. Trump, Mr. Carlson only made himself more intriguing to the former president.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnd the two have grown closer since. Although Mr. Trump was reportedly upset when text messages from Mr. Carlson calling Mr. Trump “a demonic force” and claiming “I hate him passionately” were released in March as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox, the two patched things up in a phone call. And in April, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” devoted a whole hour to Mr. Carlson’s one-on-one softball interview with Mr. Trump — one of Mr. Trump’s longest appearances on the cable network since he was in the White House.Less than two weeks later, Fox fired Mr. Carlson. The reasons for his sacking remain unclear. It may have had to do with offensive comments he had made about Fox executives in texts uncovered in the Dominion suit. Or it could have been because of another lawsuit, from Abby Grossberg, a former head of booking on his show, accusing him and the network of creating a hostile work environment. Or it might have had something to do with a potential lawsuit from Ray Epps, a Jan. 6 protester from Arizona who was at the center of Mr. Carlson’s false conspiracy theory about the day. Or perhaps, as some reporting from Semafor suggests, the 92-year-old Mr. Murdoch has simply become erratic in his decision-making.Whatever the reason, Mr. Carlson now finds himself with no shortage of options. He could go to work for Newsmax or One America News Network, two upstart right-wing networks that have been trying to outflank Fox. (By Wednesday, two days after Mr. Carlson’s firing, Fox News’s ratings in the 8 p.m. hour had plummeted by roughly half, to their lowest levels in more than 20 years. Meanwhile, Newsmax’s audience in that time slot rose more than 300 percent over the previous week.) He might strike out on his own and form a media company to stream his show online. (“The world is Tucker’s oyster,” says one person who spoke with Mr. Carlson this week. “Many billionaires and others with deep pockets would be eager to fund a new venture.”)Ratings at Fox News during Mr. Carlson’s former time slot have plummetedTotal weeknight viewership at 8 p.m.

      Source: AdweekBy The New York TimesAnd there’s always the chance that he could run for office. That’s a prospect that Mr. Carlson has long pooh-poohed. “I have zero ambition, not just politically but in life,” he demurred last summer when he was asked about any White House ambitions. But one of his friends recalls a family member discussing the possibility of Mr. Carlson running for president as far back as 2012.On Wednesday night just after 8 o’clock — the time when, until his firing two days earlier, he’d usually be launching into his opening monologue on Fox News — Mr. Carlson reappeared with a short, somewhat cryptic video on Twitter. He talked about “how unbelievably stupid most of the debates you see on television are” and complained that both political parties and their donors “actively collude” to shut down discussion of the truly important issues: “war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, natural resources.” America has become a “one-party state,” where the “people in charge” know that the old “orthodoxies” won’t last, he said, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. “True things prevail. Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left but there are some, and that’s enough,” he continued. “As long as you can hear the words, there is hope. See you soon.” In under two hours, the video racked up 11 million views.It was vintage Mr. Carlson, and it showed how he had already incorporated his firing into the apocalyptic worldview he’s so successfully promulgated these last few years. Fox News was now part of “the elite consensus” Mr. Carlson seeks to overturn. And in this moment of unraveling, when hostility toward and distrust of institutions and elites is at an all-time high, it’s not hard to imagine a good segment of Americans following along with this logic. In their minds, Fox will now join Wall Street and big tech, globalists and the deep state, the Republican establishment and the woke as something that must be opposed. And in a world in which an increasing number of Americans are already fracturing into their own realities, Mr. Carlson will stand, for many of them, as the one person who’s independent and courageous and powerful enough to tell them the truth. Just as Mr. Murdoch and Fox failed to make Mr. Trump a nonperson, they likely won’t be able to make Mr. Carlson one, either.

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      Jason Zengerle (@zengerle) is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a New America national fellow. His forthcoming book about Tucker Carlson and conservative media is “Hated by All the Right People.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Voters Are Wary of Biden. Here’s Why He Might Win Anyway.

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      Diana Nguyen and Rachel Quester, Patricia Willens and Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicPresident Biden has announced that he will seek another term in the Oval Office, despite the fact that he will be 81 on Election Day 2024.Not everyone is overjoyed about that prospect — more than half of Democrats don’t want him to run again. Nonetheless, the party’s leaders are increasingly confident about his chances. Jonathan Weisman, a political correspondent for The Times, explains why.On today’s episodeJonathan Weisman, a political correspondent for The New York Times.Although President Biden has to some extent lowered the temperature in Washington and worked at times with Republicans, the United States remains deeply polarized.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBackground readingMr. Biden has acknowledged that he has not accomplished all he wished to. But that, he maintains, is an argument for his re-election.Although his poll numbers remain low, structural advantages have Democrats insisting that Mr. Biden is better positioned than his Republican rivals.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Jonathan Weisman More

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      Tucker Carlson’s Surprise Exit Stuns People in Donald Trump’s Orbit

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      The announcement on Monday that Fox News was parting ways with its top-rated prime-time host, Tucker Carlson, stunned people in Donald J. Trump’s orbit. The former president himself was surprised by the news, according to a person with direct knowledge, and his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is a close friend of Mr. Carlson’s, described the network’s decision as “mind-blowing.”“I think it changes things permanently,” Donald Trump Jr. said on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” adding that Mr. Carlson was “an actual thought leader in conservatism” and a “once-in-a-generation type talent.”The casual news observer would be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Trump and his family no longer had a relationship with Mr. Carlson, given the recent disclosures of the Fox host’s scathing private text messages, which emerged as part of the conservative network’s legal battle against Dominion Voting Systems.In early 2021, as Mr. Trump desperately tried to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Carlson texted a confidant that he hated the president “passionately.” He also described Mr. Trump as a “demonic force.”When the texts were released in March, Mr. Trump was wounded and called Mr. Carlson to talk about them, according to a person familiar with the outreach. But the two men patched it up quickly. Since then, they have talked regularly, exchanged text messages and appeared to have a closer relationship than at any time before, according to two people close to Mr. Trump who are familiar with their relationship and who did not want to be identified to discuss their private interactions.In an interview with Greg Kelly of Newsmax that was recorded shortly after Mr. Carlson’s departure became public, Mr. Trump offered support for the former anchor. “I’m shocked. I’m surprised,” Mr. Trump said. “I think Tucker’s been terrific. He’s been, especially over the last year or so, he’s been terrific to me.”Mr. Carlson did not respond to a request for comment.Last year, some of Mr. Trump’s advisers had worried that Mr. Carlson seemed poised to support the potential presidential candidacy of Mr. Trump’s top rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Mr. Carlson had given Mr. DeSantis plenty of airtime and praised his policies. But over the past six weeks, as Mr. Trump and Mr. Carlson spoke more often, the Trump team felt increasingly confident that Mr. Carlson would not be weighing in for Mr. DeSantis, who has been heavily promoted by Rupert Murdoch’s media properties including Fox News.The Trump team liked their odds even more when they learned that Mr. Carlson was disgusted with Mr. DeSantis’s decision, in late March, to call President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a “war criminal.”Senator J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican who is a close ally of both Mr. Trump and Mr. Carlson, described the Fox News host’s ousting as a shock.“Tucker is a giant, and the most powerful voice against idiotic wars and an economy that placed plutocrats over workers,” Mr. Vance said in a text message. “This is a huge loss for a conservative movement that hopes to be worthy of its own voters. I assume he’ll land on his feet and continue to have a powerful voice. If he doesn’t it will be terrible for the country.”“The best decision I ever made was leaving Fox. Good for you, @TuckerCarlson. You’re free & uncensored!” Kari Lake, a Republican who lost the governor’s race in Arizona last year, wrote in a tweet. Ms. Lake left her job as an anchor at a local Fox channel in 2021.Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, struck an upbeat tone in a Monday tweet: “Wherever Tucker Carlson goes, America will follow!”Joe Kent, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Washington State, tweeted, “Standing by for the launch of the Tucker news network, the people demand it!”One close ally of Mr. Trump said he was happy that Mr. Carlson would not be able to give rocket fuel to any other candidate on Fox’s airwaves. Yet for some candidates in the Republican primary field, the loss of Mr. Carlson could mean a minefield they would have to navigate is now gone from a prominent platform.For instance, Mr. DeSantis’s statement to Mr. Carlson weeks ago describing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” set off alarm bells and a wave of criticism among Republicans in Washington and some donors. It represented the beginning of what has been a period of concern about Mr. DeSantis’s expected candidacy from some who had seen him as the best option to stop Mr. Trump.A Trump adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the sense in Mr. Trump’s world was that any pro-Trump host at Fox News had something of a target on their back after the Dominion lawsuit.Mr. Trump’s longest-serving adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., who is also an old friend of Mr. Carlson’s, said in an interview that Fox News had “essentially canceled the single most influential conservative commentator in the country, at the same time killing a cash cow for the network.”He predicted that Mr. Carlson would take his “massive audience” wherever he ends up next.Alyce McFadden More

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      Will the Fox-Dominion Settlement Affect Its News Coverage? Don’t Count on It.

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      There is little reason to think Fox News will adjust its coverage after paying a $787.5 million defamation settlement to Dominion Voting Systems. Its audience won’t let it.After the 2020 election, the talk inside Fox News was all about “a pivot” — a reorienting of its coverage away from former President Donald J. Trump and toward the more conventional Republican politics favored by the network’s founding chairman, Rupert Murdoch.Mr. Murdoch said then that he wanted to make Mr. Trump a “non person.” And as recently as January, when he was deposed as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox, his feelings hadn’t changed. “I’d still like to,” Mr. Murdoch said.But Fox’s audience — the engine of its profits and the largest in all of cable — may not let him.Anyone expecting that Fox’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion this week would make the network any humbler or gentler is likely to be disappointed. And there probably won’t be much of a shift in the way the network favorably covers Mr. Trump and the issues that resonate with his followers.“How are you going to make an argument to your hosts to not do things that rate?” said Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News editor and on-air personality who was fired by the network in 2021 and was lined up to be a witness in the Dominion case. “You can’t tell people, ‘Do anything to get a rating, but don’t cover the most popular figure in the Republican Party.’”After a hiatus from the network that lasted much of 2022, Mr. Trump is back on Fox News. He’s sat for three interviews with the network in less than a month. The most recent one, which was taped earlier this month with Mark Levin, will air on Sunday.Even voter fraud — the issue that resulted in Fox being sued for billions of dollars by Dominion and another voting technology company, Smartmatic — hasn’t entirely gone away. In Mr. Trump’s recent interview with the Fox host Tucker Carlson, he implied that there was good reason to doubt the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory, saying, “People could say he won an election.”Mr. Carlson, for his part, has also dipped back into election denialism recently. “Jan. 6, I think, is probably second only to the 2020 election as the biggest scam of my lifetime,” he said on the air on March 14. (His private text messages, revealed as part of Dominion’s suit, show him discussing with his producers how there was no proof the results of the 2020 election were materially affected by fraud.)The Fox host Tucker Carlson with former President Donald J. Trump last year. Mr. Carlson has recently dipped back into election denialism on air.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn the immediate term, Mr. Murdoch seems unlikely to make any major changes at any of his Fox properties. Doing so, said three people who have worked closely with him, would be seen as the kind of acknowledgment of wrongdoing he is loath to make. The Dominion settlement included no apology — just a glancing reference to a judge’s findings that Fox had broadcast false statements about Dominion machines and their role in a fanciful plot to steal the election from Mr. Trump.The $787.5 million payout is huge — itself an acknowledgment of wrongdoing of sorts, as one of the largest settlements ever in a defamation case. But it did not lead to the same degree of personal humiliation as the phone hacking scandal involving Mr. Murdoch’s British newspapers. Then, in 2011, he had to appear before Parliament and atone for how his journalists had illegally hacked the voice mail accounts of prominent figures. He had a foam pie thrown in his face and admitted during his testimony, “This is the most humble day of my life.”But his signature American news channel is showing few signs of humility. It devoted two short segments on Tuesday to news of the Dominion settlement. Its coverage then quickly returned to the same subjects it’s been hammering since Mr. Biden was elected.Its news reports on the surge of migrants at the southern border are presented under the rubric “Biden Border Crisis.” Republican lawmakers’ efforts to pass laws banning transgender girls from school sports teams receive prominent attention — when only a tiny number are actually playing, and sometimes none at all in states where the laws have been fiercely debated. President Biden is variously portrayed as incoherent, corrupt and weak — especially regarding his posture toward China. Footage of criminals ransacking stores, assaulting police officers and attacking unwitting bystanders play on a loop — often with perpetrators who are Black.Even Mr. Trump’s lies about fraud in the 2020 presidential election have cropped up here and there. Last week, the right-wing commentator Clay Travis appeared on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” which last year replaced a more straight news program at 7 p.m., and declared that Mr. Biden “only won by 20,000 votes after they rigged the entire election, after they hid everything associated with Hunter Biden, with the big tech, with the big media, and with the big Democrat Party collusion that all worked in his favor.”Mr. Watters did not correct or respond to those remarks on the air.The Fox host Jesse Watters did not correct or respond to false statements made on his show about the 2020 presidential election by the right-wing commentator Clay Travis.John Lamparski/Getty ImagesStories of voter fraud, often exaggerated and unsubstantiated, have been part of the network’s D.N.A. well before 2020. In 2012, Roger Ailes, who founded Fox News with Mr. Murdoch, sent a team of journalists to Ohio to investigate still-unproven claims of malfeasance at the polls after former President Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney there. There are, however, some subtle signs that Fox wishes to move past the Dominion episodes and its embarrassing disclosures of network executives privately belittling the same fraud claims they allowed on the air. It has recently started a promotional campaign highlighting its team of global correspondents in 30-second ads. “We have a mission to be on the ground reporting the big stories,” one says. The tensions between its news division and its prime-time hosts were exposed as part of the Dominion case, with private messages from late 2020 showing that hosts like Mr. Carlson and Sean Hannity had mocked and complained about reporters in the Fox Washington bureau who would fact-check the former president’s fraud claims.And last week, Fox chose not to renew the contract of one of the most vociferous election deniers on its payroll, Dan Bongino, formerly the host of a Saturday evening show.A spokeswoman for Fox News said in a written statement that the network had “significantly increased its investment in journalism over the last several years, further expanding our news gathering commitment both domestically and abroad.” The statement added, “We are incredibly proud of our team of journalists.”In his deposition, Rupert Murdoch, the founding chairman of Fox News, acknowledged referring privately to Mr. Trump as “nuts,” “plain bonkers” and “unable to suppress his egomania.”Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Trump undoubtedly remains one of the biggest stories of the moment, putting the network’s leadership in a position it finds less than ideal. In his deposition, Mr. Murdoch acknowledged referring privately to the former president as “nuts,” “plain bonkers” and “unable to suppress his egomania.” His personal politics are much closer to an establishment Republican in the mold of Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader whom Mr. Ailes worked for as a media consultant decades ago.Mr. Trump can still draw high ratings, even if he is no longer the singular figure he once was in the Republican Party. His interview with Mr. Carlson, after his indictment in Manhattan on felony charges, drew an audience of 3.7 million. An interview that Mr. Carlson did several weeks before with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida drew 3.1 million.In the end, the numbers may be the decisive factor about what kind of coverage Fox gives the former president, no matter Mr. Murdoch’s preferences.A former Fox executive, John Ellis, summarized the conundrum the network has with its audience in his newsletter after Mr. Trump announced his 2024 campaign — an event that Fox News broadcast live. “The power of Fox News to influence the outcomes of GOP primaries can be decisive,” he wrote. Fox’s audience has plenty of Trump supporters, of course, but also many others who may prefer another Republican as the nominee. People who identify as politically independent watch it far more than they do CNN or MSNBC, according to data from Nielsen in January and February.“Trump probably cannot win the 2024 nomination if Fox News is determined to defeat him,” Mr. Ellis added. “But in order to defeat him, Fox News must have the permission of its audience to do so.”Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting. More

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      What Next for Dominion After Its $787.5 Million Fox Settlement

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      The election technology company has several more defamation lawsuits pending against public figures and news outlets.Dominion Voting Systems did more on Tuesday than settle its lawsuit against Fox News for $787.5 million: It also set the tone for the many related defamation cases it has filed. Legal experts say the settlement with Fox News, one of the largest defamation payouts in American history, could embolden Dominion as it continues to defend its reputation, which it says was savaged by conspiracy theories about vote fraud during the 2020 election. The company has several cases pending against public figures including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive, and news outlets such as Newsmax.The targets of Dominion’s remaining lawsuits, few of which have deep pockets and legal firepower at Fox’s level, will likely take a cue from Dominion and Fox’s face-off, legal experts said.“Even though it was a settlement, it certainly was a victory for Dominion,” said Margaret M. Russell, a law professor at Santa Clara University. “For other possible defendants, I don’t think this will make them double down; it will make them fearful.”Dominion is the second-largest election technology company operating in the United States, where there are few other major players. The company, whose majority owner is the private equity firm Staple Street Capital, was made “toxic” by the false fraud narratives in 2020, one of Staple Street’s founders said in court documents. At one point, Dominion estimated that misinformation cost it $600 million in profits.Fox said in its court filings that Dominion did not have to lay off employees, close offices or default on any debts, nor did it suffer any canceled business contracts as a result of the news network’s coverage. Fox said in one filing that Dominion had projected $98 million in revenue for 2022, which would make Tuesday’s settlement the equivalent of eight years of sales.Dominion’s customers are largely officials who oversee voting in states and counties around the country; the company served 28 states, as well as Puerto Rico, in the 2020 election. The false stories about fraud that were directed at the company were embraced by some local election officials.In court documents, an expert enlisted by Dominion said that the company had very low early contract termination rates and very high contract renewal rates before the 2020 election, but blamed the preoccupation with the false fraud claims for prompting some clients to exit deals after the vote.Now, Dominion has emerged from its tussle with Fox in a stronger position to win back any skittish clients or score new business, legal experts said.Last month, the judge in Dominion’s case against Fox reviewed evidence of the false claims and wrote that it “is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” effectively confirming that the company was aboveboard.The secretary of state of New Mexico, Maggie Toulouse Oliver, applauded Tuesday’s settlement.“The harm done by election lies/denialism since 2020 is immeasurable, but this settlement against Fox News provides accountability & sends a strong message we’re happy to see,” Ms. Toulouse Oliver wrote on Twitter. During the midterm primaries last year, she blamed “unfounded conspiracy theories” when she sued officials in Otero county who had cited concerns about Dominion machines in their refusal to certify election results.Fox acknowledged in a statement on Tuesday that some of the claims it had made about Dominion were false, saying that the admission “reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”John Poulos, Dominion’s founder and chief executive, said in a statement on Tuesday that Fox caused “enormous damage” to his company and “nothing can ever make up for that.” He also thanked the election officials who make up Dominion’s clientele, and nodded to Staple Street’s support. “Lies have consequences,” a lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems said during a news conference.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesDominion drew some complaints that by settling, it had given up the opportunity to extract an apology from Fox or force it through a potentially embarrassing trial. An opinion article in the Daily Beast bemoaned that the voting technology company had “decided to step out of the ring with a bag of money instead of vanquishing one of the country’s most destructive and influential peddlers of hate and disinformation.”Mr. Poulos called the settlement “a big step forward for democracy” in an interview with ABC News broadcast on Wednesday.Legal experts noted that even if Dominion had prevailed in a jury verdict, it would have risked years of expensive battles over appeals from Fox.“The tort of defamation is not about saving democracy from liars,” said Enrique Armijo, a professor and First Amendment expert at Elon University School of Law. “It’s about saving the reputation of the people who have been lied about and making those liars compensate them for the harms to their reputations.”Fox still faces other legal challenges, including a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit from another election technology company, Smartmatic. Fox said it planned to defend freedom of the press in the case and called Smartmatic’s damages claims “outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis.” Smartmatic said in a statement that, after the Dominion settlement, it “will expose the rest” of the “misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign.”Dominion, too, has more cases pending, including against the pro-Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and One America News Network. Although the lawsuits involve similar false claims of election fraud, the facts of each case vary, experts said.Attorneys for Mr. Lindell and Mr. Giuliani did not immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did Newsmax or OAN.For the individuals and smaller companies facing legal claims, for whom a substantial jury judgment could be an “existential” threat, settlement may seem more attractive after Tuesday, Mr. Armijo said.“They’re not going to be able to put up the same level of defense that Fox did; they just don’t have the resources to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to see the other defamation defendants in the remaining cases getting any further than Fox did, which, as we saw, is not very far.” More

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      Why Fox News Had to Settle With Dominion

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      WILMINGTON, Del. — It is deeply disappointing that Fox News settled the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems before Rupert Murdoch and his roster of celebrity propagandists had to testify. But it is not surprising. Fox News, after all, had no viable defense.On Tuesday, I arrived at Superior Court here at 7 a.m. to secure a seat for what I, like many others, hoped would be an epic trial about the falsehoods Fox aired after the 2020 election, when it accused Dominion and the voting technology company Smartmatic of perpetrating heinous voter fraud. Jury selection took all morning, and opening statements were scheduled for the afternoon.More than anything, I was curious about what Fox’s lawyers would say, because there seemed so little that they could say. Part of Fox’s sinister on-air brilliance is the way it encases its audience in a comprehensive alternative reality. But now, for once, the network would be forced to account for itself outside the right-wing bubble. How it would possibly do so was a matter of great suspense.Already, Eric Davis, the judge in the case, had ruled in Dominion’s favor on key issues. “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” he wrote in a March 31 pretrial decision, a rare judicial use of all-caps bold italics. Fox’s statements, he ruled, constituted “defamation per se.”Davis prohibited Fox from arguing that the network was merely reporting on allegations made by Donald Trump and his lawyers, which Fox contended were newsworthy whether or not they were true. So the case would turn not on whether Fox had aired defamatory falsehoods, which Davis determined it had, but on whether, in airing defamatory falsehoods, Fox had displayed “actual malice” — essentially, reckless disregard for the truth.The evidence for such reckless disregard brought to light by Dominion’s lawyers during the discovery phase of the case was already overwhelming, and the trial promised more to come. A filing that Fox’s lawyers made last week demonstrated their predicament. In it, the attorneys laid out some of the points they planned to make in their opening argument, asking for “guidance from the court to ensure that it can make its opening statement without undue interruption and delay.” Those points looked a lot like an attempt by Fox to use a legal backdoor to smuggle in arguments that the judge had already forbidden.“To defend this case, Fox witnesses must be able to testify about the reasons why Fox covered the allegations on the air,” said the filing. “Fox witnesses will all testify that they covered the Dominion-related allegations because the allegations were part of the most newsworthy story of the day.” This, even though Davis had specifically ruled that this argument was invalid because, among other things, “the evidence does not support” the contention that Fox “conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.”In order to defend Fox from a finding of actual malice, its lawyers seemed set on bringing Fox’s alternative reality into the courtroom, acting as if taking Trump and his attorneys at their word was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Testimony and documentary evidence, Fox’s lawyers said in the filing, “will show that the president and the lawyers bringing the election fraud lawsuits continuously told Fox that they had evidence to support their claims and that they would be presenting that evidence to courts.” That, in turn, explains why the Fox hosts “did not know that the president’s allegations were false or harbor serious doubts about the truth of the allegations.”In other words, they can’t be blamed for treating the president of the United States as a reliable source.Responding to the filing, Davis refused to give Fox the green light it sought. If the network’s lawyers wanted to make the arguments that they were telegraphing, they would have to take their chances in front of the jury, and risk getting shut down. On Tuesday morning, Davis reminded the parties that they would not be able to make arguments “about things that I’ve ruled inadmissible.” I was waiting to hear what Fox’s lawyers were going to argue instead.But after lunch, the jury didn’t return, and Davis came back to the courtroom only briefly before beckoning some of the lawyers out. The hours ticked by while the journalist-filled audience grew increasingly restless. Courtroom protocol against texting or using the internet gradually collapsed. News broke that the judge had ordered a special master to investigate whether Fox had “complied with their discovery obligations.” (The network had previously been sanctioned for withholding evidence.) Rumors about a settlement buzzed through the room.At 4 p.m., the jury filed back in, and the judge confirmed that the trial was over before it began.Fox is paying Dominion $787.5 million, which appears to be one of the largest defamation settlements in history and is one that constitutes a humiliating admission of fault by the network, even though, as The New York Times’s Jim Rutenberg reported, the deal doesn’t require Fox to apologize. But the public will be deprived of seeing Murdoch, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and several of their colleagues grilled on the stand, forced to reckon with the real world, unable to fall back on the dense lattice of misinformation that typically sustains Fox’s narratives.At least, the public will be deprived for now. Smartmatic is still suing Fox for $2.7 billion, though no trial date has been announced yet. “Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign,” Smartmatic lawyer J. Erik Connolly said in a statement on Tuesday. “Smartmatic will expose the rest.”I’m not sure I believe it — Fox has just shown the world what it’s willing to pay to avoid the unmasking. But reality isn’t done with Murdoch and the rest of them yet.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Fox-Dominion Trial Delayed: What to Know About the Company Behind the Lawsuit

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      Dominion, which is owned by a New York private equity firm, has accused the news network of spreading false narratives about its election technology.If not for the 2020 election, most people would not have heard of Dominion Voting Systems, an elections technology company that John Poulos started out of his basement in Canada more than two decades ago.But in the days and weeks after the election, former President Donald J. Trump and many of his allies accused the company of perpetrating election fraud. Dominion then filed a slew of defamation lawsuits against public figures and news networks, accusing them of spreading the false narratives and exposing its employees to harassment. The company’s case against Fox News is scheduled to go to trial this week. Judge Eric M. Davis, who is presiding over the case, said in a statement late on Sunday that he was delaying the trial by a day, until Tuesday. He did not cite a reason but said he would make an announcement Monday at 9 a.m.Here is what we know about the company, from its private equity owner in New York to its powerful perch in the nation’s elections industry.Dominion’s Early DaysDominion became one of the largest providers of election technology in the United States by selling, licensing and maintaining products such as its Democracy Suite software and ImageCast voting and tabulation machines. During the 2020 election, the company served 28 states, including many swing states, as well as Puerto Rico. Mr. Poulos, who has degrees in electrical engineering and business, incorporated Dominion in Toronto in 2003 with some friends after a stint in Silicon Valley. His sister was his first investor, followed by his parents and his friends’ parents. (Dominion declined to comment for this article.)The company is named after Canada’s 1920 Dominion Elections Act, which removed barriers to voting that had excluded women and voters of certain racial, religious or economic groups. Mr. Poulos’s business idea was to help people with disabilities, such as paralysis or blindness, cast their ballots as independently as possible while still leaving an auditable paper trail. Dominion incorporated accessible technology like audio readouts and large screens into election machines.The company scored its first American contract in 2009, providing voting technology to dozens of counties in New York. The next year, it moved its headquarters to Denver, where it now has several hundred employees.Private Equity OwnersStaple Street Capital, a private equity firm in New York, is the majority owner of Dominion. Mr. Poulos, Dominion’s chief executive, retains a roughly 12 percent stake. PennantPark Investment, a financial firm based in Miami, is another investor.Fox said in a legal filing that Staple Street paid $38.3 million in 2018 to acquire 76.2 percent of Dominion. At the time, the private equity firm valued the technology vendor at $80 million, or one-twentieth of the $1.6 billion in damages that Dominion had sought from Fox, according to Fox’s filing.Staple Street’s owners, Stephen D. Owens and Hootan Yaghoobzadeh, first worked together in 1998 on buyouts for the Carlyle Group, a private equity giant. (Their résumés also feature stints at Lehman Brothers and Cerberus Capital Management.) The firm’s board of directors includes a former chief executive of Dunkin’ Brands as well as a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and ambassador to the European Union.Staple Street declined to comment.On its website, Staple Street says it has $900 million of assets under management — mostly midsize companies such as a flower bulb distributor in New Jersey, an accounting and payroll reporting service popular with restaurant chains, a support organization for dental clinics and, at one point, the theme park operator Six Flags.Fox said in its filing that Mr. Yaghoobzadeh had authorized Dominion’s lawsuit against the network. The lawsuit, Fox said, is meant to generate publicity, deter negative reporting and “unjustly enrich” Staple Street.Fox cited discovery documents that it said showed Dominion “in a solid financial position, maintaining substantial cash, carrying no debt and producing a steady return on investment” to Staple Street. In 2021, Dominion paid full bonuses to its employees and executives and projected $98 million in revenue for 2022, Fox said.Last year, when asked whether he believed that Dominion was a “toxic” company after the 2020 election, Mr. Owens answered, “That’s correct.”A Business in FluxIn its complaint, which it filed in 2021, Dominion accused Fox of broadcasting lies that “deeply damaged” its “once-thriving” business, “one of the fastest-growing technology companies in North America” with a potential value of more than $1 billion.Shasta County, a rural area in Northern California that has become a hotbed for election denial, terminated its Dominion contract in January. Lawmakers in Montgomery County in Pennsylvania renewed a deal with Dominion for $518,052 in February, the same month that officials in Kern County, north of Los Angeles, narrowly approved a three-year, $672,948 contract after hours of heated debate.Dominion’s contracts with local and state governments typically last for several years and range from tens of thousands of dollars to more than $100 million, the company said in its complaint against Fox. The company estimated that misinformation about the company had cost it more than $600 million in profits.In an expert witness report submitted in the case late last year, Mark J. Hosfield, a managing director of the investment bank and advisory firm Stout, wrote that the false narratives had led Dominion to lose $88 million in profits from current and future opportunities. He also wrote that Fox’s coverage had caused the value of Dominion’s equity and debt to drop $920.8 million. Dominion’s renewal rate with clients had historically been 90 percent, he said.Fox has said the $1.6 billion that Dominion is seeking is “a staggering figure that has no factual support” and was “pulled out of thin air.” There has been no evidence of Dominion’s laying off employees, closing offices, defaulting on credit obligations or suffering canceled contracts as a result of Fox’s coverage, the network said.Fox said in other court filings last year that “Dominion’s calculations are riddled with mathematical overstatements” and losses misattributed to damaging news coverage, and that the company had beaten revenue forecasts that it set before the election.“Dominion’s lawsuit is a political crusade in search of a financial windfall, but the real cost would be cherished First Amendment rights,” Fox said in a statement.Dominion, in a statement said: “In the coming weeks, we will prove Fox spread lies causing enormous damage to Dominion. We look forward to trial.”An Important but Mysterious IndustryThe elections technology industry has few major players and offers little public information about its finances. Dominion is most likely the second-largest company of its kind operating in the United States, behind Election Systems & Software in Nebraska, according to Verified Voting, an election security nonprofit.Both companies, along with Hart InterCivic in Texas, have acquired smaller competitors over the past two decades. As of 2016, the three vendors served more than 90 percent of eligible voters in the country, according to a report from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.Wharton researchers at that point described the election technology business as having “all the aspects of an industry that new investors would want to avoid — a costly regulatory environment, constrained market size, cost-conscious customers, and concentrated and entrenched vendors.”The Brennan Center for Justice estimated last year that replacing outdated voting equipment over the next five years could cost more than $580 million. A group of Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, sent letters in 2019 to Staple Street and other private equity firms that had invested in election technology companies, voicing concern about industry consolidation and the maintenance of voting machines. In response, Staple Street wrote to Ms. Warren that it spent roughly 10 to 20 percent of its revenue on research and development.Susan C. Beachy More

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      Is Public Television the Israeli Government’s Next Target?

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      When you host one of the world’s last over-the-air radio shows in Yiddish, fans occasionally get in touch. But you hear more often from critics. They write to Avraham Zaks, the 37-year-old behind the mic of a weekly program called “We Are Here!” to nitpick about his grammar. Or to complain about his accent, which doesn’t sound sufficiently Eastern European to their ears. Some tell him the show needs more religious content.Mr. Zaks, who has flecks of gray in his beard and warm dark eyes and wears wire-rim glasses, does not mind. On some level, he is kind of tickled by the feedback.“I write and say: ‘Thank you very much, we’re doing our best. It’s nice to hear that you’re listening,’” he said on a Wednesday afternoon, just minutes before his show started. “The problem in broadcasting generally is that most of the time, you don’t get any reaction. You feel like you’re speaking to yourself.”“We Are Here!” is one of a handful of niche language radio offerings of Kan, Israel’s public media network, officially known as the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation.Avraham Zaks, the host of a weekly program called “We Are Here!” on Kan, Israel’s public media network.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesMost of the company’s 1,000 employees run a highly regarded TV, radio and digital news division or oversee the production of some of the country’s most prestigious television shows, some of which air on U.S. streaming platforms. As Israel’s answer to the BBC or PBS, Kan, whose headquarters is in Jerusalem, is more interested in gravity than ratings.These days, Kan has a new focus: survival. It sits squarely in the cross hairs of Israel’s right-wing government elected in November. Through Shlomo Karhi, the minister of communications, the government has issued a number of threats against the network, starting with a vow to defund the company and shut it down.“There is no place in this day and age for a public broadcaster when there is a wide range of channels,” Mr. Karhi said during a news conference in January.In case anyone thought he was talking exclusively about saving taxpayer money — Kan receives the equivalent of $180 million a year from Israel’s coffers, about 85 percent of the company’s budget — he also accused the media more broadly of being “too biased toward the left.”A few weeks later, a spokesman for Mr. Karhi said in a statement that the closure of Kan was delayed “until further notice” so that the government could concentrate on overhauling the judiciary, a plan that has convulsed the nation.More recently, the minister said he wanted to strip Kan of three of its eight radio spectrums, which are needed for radio stations. The station broadcasting “We Are Here!” is expected to survive any cull because an Israeli regulation requires foreign language broadcasting in this nation of immigrants. The fear among Kan’s supporters is that once the government is done with the judiciary overhaul, whether its plans end with success or failure, the network is next.“If you’re looking for a textbook on how to turn a democracy into an autocracy, it includes shutting down independent media,” said Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, who drafted Kan’s journalistic code of ethics. The media market in Israel, a country of 10 million people, is small by American standards and highly competitive. There are four TV networks in total. The other three are privately held and Kan is generally in a tie for fourth place in the ratings race with Channel 14. That network, often called Israel’s version of Fox News, enthusiastically supports the Netanyahu administration. In recent months, according to the network, it has enjoyed a ratings surge.Political leaders in Israel, like those in virtually every country, try to influence and shape news coverage. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems especially eager to manage the media. Two of the three corruption trials against him involve quid pro quos for favorable coverage from powerful publishers — one the owner of a large daily newspaper and the other a telecom tycoon who operates a popular online news site. (Mr. Netanyahu denies wrongdoing.)“The coalition is not interested in the standard pushback game we’ve seen in the past,” said Shuki Tausig, chief editor of The Seventh Eye, a media watchdog publication. “They want to use regulations to weaken, or even smash, big commercial players that are not obeying them. And they want to eliminate or control Kan.”The network is the successor to the Israel Broadcasting Authority, which was closed in 2017 after critics from across the political spectrum concluded that its programming was shabby and the authority too easily buffeted by politicians, who appointed its board members and controlled its budget.Kan has been designed for imperviousness to partisanship, relatively speaking; the job of selecting board members is up to industry professionals. It’s a structure that has produced a catalog of highly compelling television, including a three-part documentary about Adolph Eichmann, “The Devil’s Confession,” available on Amazon Prime and bankrolled by a number of companies. Last month, Kan was nominated for 125 Ophir Awards, Israel’s version of the Oscars and Emmys, more than double its nearest rival.The media market in Israel, a country of 10 million people, is small by American standards and highly competitive. There are four TV networks in total. Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times“All the other networks are trying to make a profit so they are filled with shows where people are on an island for three weeks fighting over a bag of rice,” said Tsuriel Rashi, senior lecturer at Ariel University’s School of Communication. The Eichmann documentary, he added, was “a huge undertaking.”“It’s expensive, and it won’t make money,” he said, “but it’s important.”Kan is in an office building in a generic patch in Jerusalem, not far from an ultra Orthodox neighborhood and near the Israel Tax Authority. During a recent visit, the place hummed with reporters readying an evening broadcast. In the Arab media room, a handful of employees were watching dozens of televisions broadcasting from around the Middle East.“Today is kind of quiet,” said a reporter with his eyes trained on the screens. “There was a machine gun fired into the air in Gaza, which set off sirens in Israel, but no rockets.”“I’ve seen scarier things in my professional life,” one of his colleagues said.Despite the business-as-usual vibe here, morale has sagged, as it would at any institution facing extinction.“We had a companywide meeting a few weeks ago, and I told everyone, ‘I know there are people here who go home at night and have children ask if they will have a job in the morning,’” Gil Omer, chairman of the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation, said in an interview at Kan’s offices. “And I told them that we will do everything we can to keep this place alive.”Gil Omer is the chairman of the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation, known as Kan and is Israel’s answer to the BBC or PBS.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesFor now, the government appears to have scaled back its ambitions to those three radio spectrums, which it plans to make available to commercial networks.It’s not a measure Mr. Karhi could take unilaterally. Yoaz Hendel, his predecessor as minister of communications, said in an interview that Mr. Karhi did not seem to understand the job, which has nothing to do with Kan’s budget — that’s the finance ministry’s purview — and is all about building communications infrastructure, like 5G.“Karhi could announce tomorrow that all Israelis need to wear red hats, but that doesn’t mean anyone would listen to him,” Mr. Hendel said. “He should focus on what he was appointed to do, which is to make sure that Israel is well-connected.”Elad Malka, the vice director general at the Ministry of Communications, disagreed. “The minister in charge of public broadcasting is the minister of communications,” he said. “Of course, if there are changes that the minister wants, he needs to go to the Knesset,” Mr. Malka added, referring to Israel’s Parliament.Even if he lacks the authority to unplug Kan on his own, Mr. Karhi, a former member of the Knesset, has grabbed national attention in Israel because his statements appear to reflect the will of the government. And grabbing attention is one of Mr. Karhi’s specialties. In February, he denounced critics of the judicial overhaul plan as “erav rav,” an ancient term for demons who pose as Jews and must be killed. In early March, during the Jewish holiday of Purim, he tweeted a message wishing everyone well — except for reservists soldiers opposed to the judicial overhaul, who he said could “go to hell.”“He has no interest in media,” Mr. Tausig said. “His actions as minister are just political opportunism, a way to demonstrate he’s more extreme than extreme, to serve Netanyahu.”A spokesman for the Ministry of Communications declined to comment.Mr. Zaks, the host of “We Are Here!,” has closely followed the drama that has engulfed his employer, but one recent Wednesday afternoon he was more interested on his upcoming interview with the head of the Yiddish Department at Hebrew University.They discussed how to attract Israel’s ultra Orthodox to evenings of Yiddish theater and literature, a major challenge given that much of the canon is downright irreligious. Reaching the Haredi, or ultra Orthodox, community is important to Mr. Zaks, who was raised in a Lubavitcher community outside Tel Aviv. By the time he was 20, he realized that he was an atheist and left. He spent the next few years discovering popular culture that he had never encountered — television, movies, professional sports.“I knew about radio because it was on all day at home,” he said. “That was it.”The biggest group of Yiddish speakers in Israel are Haredi, but he assumes they are a tiny percent of the audience for “We Are Here!” because it’s a secular show. He knows, however, that every year a few thousand exit the ultra Orthodox community and he’s happy to offer them some connection to the world they have left behind.“It’s like being an émigré and reading a newspaper in the language you were raised in,” he said. “I don’t love the place that I left, but I love Yiddish. It’s a heritage that we have to keep.” More