Ta-ta, Tucker

Tucker Carlson, one of the original right-wing media legacy babies, has gotten the axe: MSNBC has cancelled his daily program, effective next week.

Insiders tell TVNewser Tucker Carlson's 6pmET show Tucker is getting the axe, but Carlson stays on as a political contributor to all MSNBC shows at least through the 2008 election. The official announcement, expected tomorrow, will include details about who will replace Tucker at 6pmET as well as other political programming additions.[…]

In its 33-month run, Carlson's show has had two names, four time slots and multiple formats. At 6pmET, it builds on its Harbdall lead-in on some days, but loses audience on others.

Last Thursday night, Tucker finished last among all MSNBC shows for the evening, and lost his time slot to everything except traditional cellar-dweller Headline News.

But Tucker wasn't always ratings poison: For about a year or so after its original airing, this was one of the most-viewed video clips on the web:

Stewart's appearance was on October 15, 2006; slightly over ten weeks later, CNN announced that Tucker was gone, gone, gone.

Tucker's a class act to the end, though. Glenn Greenwald (Salon Premium) discusses Tucker's recent flare-up with a Scottish journalist in which the Republican scion insisted that journalists should never quote their political sources without the source's prior permission--that not allowing political figures to preemptively and unilaterally declare anything they've said "off the record" would contaminate the trust at the heart of the journalist-politician relationship.