Did Fox Really Fire Tucker Carlson for Crossing the ‘Red Line’ of Criticizing Big Pharma, as RFK Jr. Claims?

In the scores of news articles trying to pinpoint why Fox News removed its top-rated host Tucker Carlson on April 24, the prevailing theories have centered on his behavior behind the scenes rather than what Carlson said on air: his off-color texts and internal nose-thumbing toward management; his centrality in a lawsuit filed against the company by one of his former producers; or maybe, some have speculated, it was just a condition of Fox’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.

The most notable exception has come from 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Fox fires @TuckerCarlson five days after he crosses the red line by acknowledging that the TV networks pushed a deadly and ineffective vaccine to please their Pharma advertisers,” Kennedy, who had appeared during Carlson’s final week, tweeted in reaction to the news. “Carlson’s breathtakingly courageous April 19 monologue broke TV’s two biggest rules: Tucker told the truth about how greedy Pharma advertisers controlled TV news content and he lambasted obsequious newscasters for promoting jabs they knew to be lethal and worthless….Fox just demonstrated the terrifying power of Big Pharma.”

Then on May 11, RFK Jr. further “connected some dots” (his phrasing) in an interview with ex-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. “What his firing showed,” Kennedy posited on Kelly’s podcast, “was that the ideology trumps popularity and even revenues, that they were willing to get rid of a guy like that because…he wouldn’t follow the narrative.”

Kennedy said his “background assumption”—that “if you talk about this on Fox, you’re going to get fired”—was based on a conversation with former Fox News chief and longtime personal friend Roger Ailes, back when Ailes was explaining why RFK could not come on the air to promote his 2014 documentary Trace Amounts: Autism, Mercury, and the Hidden Truth.

“‘I can’t do that for you, Bobby,'” Kennedy recounted, “‘because if any of my hosts allow you onto a show without asking my permission, I would have to fire them. And if I didn’t fire them, I would get a phone call from Rupert [Murdoch] within 10 minutes.'”

But what do the Fox News archives suggest about a “red line” prohibiting criticism of the pharmaceutical industry? That if there is a rule about bashing Big Pharma, no one’s enforcing it.

On May 7, two weeks after Carlson’s cancellation, host Steve Hilton of The Next Revolution kicked off a segment titled “America’s War on Children” by saying, “We often talk on this program about how Big Pharma corruptly pushes prescription drugs on adults. That’s bad enough. But just look at what they’re doing to our kids.”

This has been a recurring theme for Hilton. In February, he decried “this disgusting [Big Pharma] corruption that’s really really hurting—and killing!—Americans.” In July 2017, Hilton devoted a “Swamp Watch” segment to drug companies, asking “Who could possibly benefit from us spending more on drugs but not getting any healthier as a result? The pharmaceutical companies, whose main incentive is to sell as many drugs as possible.”

Fox has broken RFK’s purported “two biggest rules” about pharmaceutical influence and COVID vaccine prom