Fox News host Tucker Carlson has backed away from his plan to expand the “northernmost bureau of Fox News” in western Maine after it went public.
In a letter to the town of Bryant Pond, a town in Oxford County, Carlson had expressed interest in buying the old town garage next to the town’s library and turning it into a studio with room enough for an audience, according to the Sun Journal, which first reported Carlson’s plans.
“I’d be responsible for buying and repairing the building,” he said in the letter, which the Sun Journal quoted. Carlson offered to buy the garage for $30,000, and said Fox “has agreed to install an advanced, broadcast-level studio if we get it.”
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But now Carlson told the Sun Journal the publicity has spoiled the plans and that Fox doesn’t want to leave expensive broadcasting equipment in a rural studio whose presence has been widely publicized.
“I can’t have the building now,” Carlson told the Sun Journal. “I’m kind of crushed.”
Carlson, who vacations at Christopher Lake in town, has paid $2,500 per year to rent space in the basement of the Bryant Pond library from which he has broadcasted, according to the Sun Journal.
Town Manager Vern Maxfield previously told the Sun Journal that he expected Bryant Pond’s voters would have approved the sale at next week’s town meeting.
Bryant Pond has a population of about 1,300, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. It is northwest of Lewiston and Auburn.
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Carlson has recently come under fire after recordings surfaced of him making misogynistic, racist and homophobic remarks on the shock-jock radio program “Bubba the Love Sponge Show.” Those recordings, dating from 2006 to 2011, were released by Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group, starting Sunday, according to the Washington Post.
In response, some advertisers have begun to back away from Carlson’s show on Fox News.