Calling Fox senior executive a C-word was apparently the last straw for Tucker Carlson

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story and the headline incorrectly suggested that Tucker Carlson described Fox CEO Suzanne Scott as a "c-word." The name of the Fox executive he allegedly described this way has not been identified.

The Wall Street Journal is out with its own anonymously-sourced report on why Tucker Carlson found himself ejected from Fox News on Monday, and because the Journal is itself another big chunk of the Murdoch family empire, we can imagine that the "people familiar with the matter" they're using as the basis for their story are likely people named Murdoch and/or people who have the private phone numbers of people named Murdoch.

The short version of the Journal report is that Tucker was finally cut loose because—and brace yourself for this shocking new news—Tucker Carlson was a notorious asshole, nobody in the Fox offices could stand him, and the Fox legal review of Carlson's private communications necessitated by the Dominion lawsuit turned up so much toxic behavior that not even pseudo-friend Lachlan Murdoch could stomach keeping him on.

The slightly longer version is that Tucker let his enormous frat boy head get too big for his preppy conservative britches, and that's allegedly one of the few things you can do inside the Rupert Murdoch empire that will get the personal peeved attention of ol' Rupe himself. The Murdoch family was evidently fine with Tucker's frequent forays into white supremacist conspiracies, pandemic denialism, gaslighting about Jan. 6 violence and the rest of it. It's when Tucker started thinking he was important to Fox that the Murdochs gave him the heave-ho.