Tucker Carlson Tonight was one of the popular shows on Fox News. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
“Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight,” the former Fox News host said.
In a stunning announcement, Fox News said on April 24 that it has ended Tucker Carlson’s reign as the host of the network’s highest-rated primetime show (and one of the highest-rated shows on basic cable, period), effective immediately.
The news came less than a week after Fox’s massive settlement with Dominion over its spread of misinformation about Dominion voting machines. Though Carlson’s role in the lawsuit was relatively small, some of his texts that were uncovered in the discovery process for the suit made headlines, and many reports are citing them as the reason why Carlson got the boot.
Fox News’s statement said very little, merely that the two parties “have agreed to part ways” and “we thank him for his service to the network.” After two days of silence, Carlson finally tweeted a video that didn’t directly address the situation. In the absence of an explanation, there’s some understandable speculation that another, bigger scandal is behind it waiting to be uncovered.
But it’s also looking more and more likely that Carlson’s ouster was the result of a combination of factors, including disparaging remarks about Fox News executives, a toxic workplace culture, and Carlson’s view that he was untouchable at Fox News and that the network needed him more than he needed it.
Whatever the real reason(s), they were enough that Fox News felt it needed to cut off its biggest star without even giving him a chance to say goodbye. It’s still unclear what’s next for Carlson or what Fox News looks like without Carlson at its center.
Here’s what we know so far.
What happened?
Tucker Carlson is no longer working for Fox News Media. His show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, which ran on the network for over six years, is over. Fox News Tonight will replace it on an interim basis. Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade hosted its first week. He briefly mentioned Carlson’s departure, saying: “As you probably have heard, Fox News and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. I wish Tucker the best. I’m great friends with Tucker and always will be. But right now, it’s time for Fox News Tonight. So let’s get started.”
Carlson also had a prominent place on Fox News’s streaming channel, Fox Nation, where he hosted a daytime talk show and several documentaries. Fox News’s statement did not specifically mention the future of his Fox Nation shows, and Fox News did not respond to requests for comment on what will happen to the streaming channel’s library of Carlson content.
Carlson was with Fox News since 2009, though his presence was relatively minor until the premiere of Tucker Carlson Tonight in November 2016. Carlson’s last episode aired Friday, April 21, 2023.
What does Tucker Carlson have to say?
Initially, nothing. Carlson was uncharacteristically quiet for two days, emerging on April 26 at 8 pm — the time his show would have been on the air — with a video. It was a two-minute-long diatribe about how powerful people and the media are lying to the American public, and how there are few places left to find the truth. It was almost indistinguishable from the monologues Carlson used to open his show with, down to the fact that it didn’t really say anything or directly answer any questions.
“Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left, but there are some, and that’s enough. As long as you can hear the words, there is hope. See you soon,” he said.
Good evening pic.twitter.com/SPrsYKWKCE
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 27, 2023
Carlson has reportedly hired lawyer Bryan Freedman, who seems to specialize in getting significant settlements from media companies when they fire their stars. His past clients include Megyn Kelly, Chris Harrison, and Gabrielle Union. His current clients include Don Lemon, who was fired from CNN on the same day that Carlson was let go from Fox, and former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo.
How sudden was his exit?
Very. Despite Fox News’s statement that implied the decision was mutual, all signs point to Carlson being fired with almost no warning. Carlson reportedly didn’t know he’d been cut until minutes before it was announced. Carlson also signed off on April 21, a Friday, with, “We’ll be back on Monday,” indicating that he expected there would be a Monday show — which, obviously, never happened.
Fox News itself didn’t seem to know for sure that Carlson would be exiting until close to the actual announcement. On the morning of April 24, the channel was still reportedly airing previews of Carlson’s show for that evening, which did not air after all.
In the days following Carlson’s departure, he was still listed as a Fox News personality and his show was still referred to as the channel’s “flagship primetime cable news program.” A week later, those had finally been wiped from the site. Fox Nation removed Carlson’s likeness and shows from its front page within days.
Why is he leaving?
Carlson’s departure has spawned rampant speculation but few facts so far. Reports attributing his firing to various factors cite unnamed sources that may well be Fox News itself; the network is well-known for pushing its preferred narrative to the press when it wants to.
The LA Times reported that Fox Corp chair Rupert Murdoch was behind the decision to fire Carlson, purportedly over a lawsuit filed by a former employee and Carlson’s on-air assertions that Ray Epps, a man who was part of the January 6 riots, was an FBI informant, which the FBI has denied. The night before Carlson’s firing, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Epps where he said Carlson’s statements led to death threats. The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, reported that the decision to fire Carlson came from Murdoch’s son, Lachlan, the CEO of Fox Corp, as well as Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott.
The proximity of the news to the Dominion lawsuit settlement makes it appear that the two are related, but Fox jettisoned its most problematic host related to the Dominion suit, Fox Business’s Lou Dobbs, back in 2021 and hasn’t fired any of its other hosts, some of whom said far worse than Carlson and were named in the lawsuits.
The most popular theory so far does include the lawsuit, however. A Washington Post report claims that Carlson’s texts criticizing Fox executives that were uncovered during the Dominion lawsuit were one possible reason for his ouster. Unnamed sources told the Wall Street Journal that there were even worse statements hidden behind redactions in the publicly available documents — which Fox News executives would have seen. And NPR reporter David Folkenflik told Vox’s Peter Kafka that he suspected keeping those out of public view was a possible reason Fox settled in the first place.
“A ton of stuff was redacted and blacked out … I actually think there’s a lot more embarrassing stuff that’s been sunk by this, that’s been kept hidden, and submerged by the settlement,” Folkenflik said.
The New York Times had some more details, reporting that Fox News executives hadn’t seen Carlson’s redacted texts until just before the trial was supposed to begin. Whatever they said was somehow more objectionable than what Carlson regularly says on Fox News’ own airwaves. So much so that preventing them from getting out was one of the reasons why Fox agreed to the last-minute settlement with Dominion. A later Times report cited a specific redacted Carlson text where the host made racist comments in reference to a video of several Trump supporters attacking what he referred to as “an Antifa kid.”
“Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight,” Carlson allegedly said in the text.
Media Matters for America has also obtained behind-the-scenes videos from Carlson’s show where he referred to someone’s girlfriend as “kind of yummy” and makes a crack about his “postmenopausal fans.” He also criticized Fox Nation, saying that “nobody watches Fox Nation because the site sucks.”
Fox is also being sued by one of Carlson’s former producers, Abby Grossberg, who accused the network of being openly sexist and said Carlson’s staff in particular denigrated women and Jewish people. Fox News has denied those allegations.
On the more gossipy side of things, Vanity Fair is reporting that Carlson may have found himself on the outs with his boss over Carlson’s increasingly open religiosity. He gave a speech last Friday where he recommended praying for 10 minutes a day, and Murdoch’s (now ex-) fiancée, Ann Lesley Smith, apparently read the Bible with Carlson during a March dinner. Days later, Murdoch and Smith’s engagement was over.
More recent reports (several of them coming from the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal) attribute Carlson’s firing not to one singular event, but to all of them. They point to a pattern of insubordination, disrespect toward Fox News executives, and growing reservations over the content of his broadcasts.
On April 27, Breitbart came out with an account that appeared to be sourced from the other side of things, all of whom were unnamed. It portrayed Carlson and Dan Bongino, who announced he was leaving the network on April 20, as innocent victims of Murdoch’s attempt to take back control of his network in the wake of the Dominion settlement. Getting rid of two of its most visible stars, who were also its most independent thinkers, was a way to tell the remaining employees “who’s the real boss.” The other media reports were waved off as untrue.
Is there any precedent for something like this?
Carlson himself got the 8 pm time slot after its inhabitant, Bill O’Reilly, was fired in 2017. Tucker Carlson Tonight, which was then in the 9 pm slot, moved to O’Reilly’s spot.
But the circumstances behind the two men’s ousters are much different. O’Reilly’s came after the revelation that Fox paid millions of dollars to cover up sexual harassment allegations against him. His problematic behavior was known about for years. When advertisers boycotted O’Reilly’s show, it was the nail in the coffin. There’s no indication that Carlson is involved in anything like that, and his firing was much more surprising.
There is also precedent for Carlson being fired from jobs. He left CNN in 2005 and MSNBC in 2008. Both times, the firing followed the cancellations of his shows, Crossfire and Tucker, respectively, reportedly due to low ratings. Carlson did not have this issue at Fox News.
How big was Carlson’s audience?
Carlson regularly averaged over 3 million viewers, making his show one of the highest-rated on all of basic cable. He led Fox News’s ratings for years, but his supremacy had recently been challenged: Another Fox News show, The Five, averaged higher ratings than he did in 2022.
Can Fox News recover from this?
If Carlson’s ascendancy at Fox News is anything to go by, the network will probably continue to thrive. When O’Reilly was fired, his was the channel’s highest-rated show, and he seemed irreplaceable. O’Reilly had been with Fox News from its launch and was, for all intents and purposes, its face.
When Carlson moved to O’Reilly’s 8 pm slot, he was able to keep most of O’Reilly’s audience in the desirable 25- to 54-year-old demographic, with most of his ratings losses coming from the 55-plus demo. In fact, he thrived: While Sean Hannity’s 9 pm show won the night for several years, Carlson surpassed him in 2020, buoyed by the pandemic and Trump’s election loss. Not only would he become Fox’s most-watched show, but he set a new record as the most-watched cable news show ever. Carlson developed his own rabid fandom, and weathered plenty of controversies of his own, surviving advertiser boycotts, accusations of racism and sexism, and unabashed and continued support of Russia. Fox gave him two shows on Fox Nation in an effort to drive up the streaming network’s subscriptions in 2021.
By the end of Carlson’s run, he’d become a powerful and influential figure both at Fox News and with the right wing in general. He hung out with President Trump (though Carlson’s texts would reveal he hated the man) and landed big interviews with Kanye West and Elon Musk.
In the days following Carlson’s dismissal, things didn’t go so well for Fox News ratings-wise. Carlson was averaging about 3 million viewers for what would be his last week. The interim replacement averaged just 1.65 million viewers the next week, with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes winning some of those nights. Perhaps more worrying for Fox, its conservative news rival, Newsmax, has seen its 8 pm viewership increase by hundreds of thousands of people. It’s still nowhere close to overtaking Fox, but we know from the Dominion lawsuit texts that the network is terrified of losing viewers, especially to Newsmax.
These are grim numbers, but it’s still very early days, and the network hasn’t settled on a permanent 8 pm show or host yet. Fox News has already proven itself to be bigger than any one of its stars. We’ll see if that’s still true.
How are people responding?
On Fox News, Carlson had become (and happily leaned into being) a polarizing figure. Accordingly, the right wing is generally furious, while the left is pleased.
Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz’s response spoke to Carlson’s power within the Republican Party: “I cannot overstate the importance that @TuckerCarlson had on public policy choices we made in the government.”
Glenn Greenwald, who became a frequent guest on Carlson’s show, said “the removal of Tucker means the elimination of the only real, sustained dissent on US militarism, the US Security State and more.” Another controversial personality who got a major platform on Carlson’s show, “Libs of TikTok” creator Chaya Raichik, tweeted “R.I.P. Fox News.” That was a sentiment many others echoed — “#RIPFoxNews” and “#DoneWithFox” briefly trended on Twitter — but it remains to be seen what impact Carlson’s exit will have on the network.
President Trump, who buddied up to Carlson but had recently discovered in the Dominion texts that Carlson secretly hated him, had a more measured response in an interview with Newsmax: “Wow, that was something. That’s a big one.” On Truth Social, however, he called it a “big blow to Cable News, and to America.”
There were a few notable, if unsurprising, exceptions. Former Wyoming Republican Representative Liz Cheney tweeted, “[I]t’s about time.” Anti-Trump Republican political action committee the Lincoln Project said in a statement that Carlson “is the worst our nation has to offer.”
The other side mostly celebrated the news. The View, which was in progress when the news came out, led the audience in singing the chorus of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joked in an Instagram story that Carlson’s exit “couldn’t have happened to a better guy,” adding that she was “very glad” to see him go. She doesn’t seem convinced, however, that we’ve seen the last of him. Carlson seems pretty sure we haven’t, either.
Update, May 3, 1 pm ET: This story was originally published on April 24 and has been updated multiple times, most recently to add more details about Carlson’s departure, speculation around the reasons, Carlson’s response, and Fox News’s ratings.