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A new report lends more weight to earlier assertions that former Fox News star Tucker Carlson was caught completely off-guard by his firing this week.
Previous reporting noted that Carlson was involved in contract negotiations with the network through 2029. And, according to another former Fox top-rated host, Bill O’Reilly, Carlson, and his staff were preparing for Monday’s show when he got the word that he was being let go instead.
“Each morning TV News producers around the country hold meetings to figure out what to put on the air. On Monday, the Tucker Carlson production team was smack in the middle of their meeting when they learned that their host was not coming to work. Ever again,” O’Reilly wrote on his blog. “Stunning is the appropriate word.”
“Six years ago, I left Fox News, so the timing of Tucker’s departure was interesting as he took my place at 8 pm. As I mentioned on the No Spin News last night, the television news industry is a brutal place to work. Always has been, but now it’s worse because media corporations have no loyalty to anyone but the bank teller,” he noted on Tuesday.
“Fox News is a far different place than it was when I spent 20 years there. And by this time next year, it will be a far different place again, of that I am certain,” O’Reilly said, adding: “The change at Fox News will affect the Republican Party deeply. It will be much tougher for the GOP to get messages out.”
An earlier report from Vanity Fair appeared to substantiate what O’Reilly speculated, which reported that Carlson was “blindsided” by the decision to part ways with him:
On Monday morning, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott called Carlson and informed him he was being taken off the air, and his Fox News email account was shut off. According to a source briefed on the conversation, Carlson was stunned by his sudden ouster from his 8 p.m. show, the most watched program in cable news last month. Carlson was in the midst of negotiating the renewal of his Fox News contract through 2029, the source said. As of last week, Carlson had told people he expected the contract to be renewed.
“Carlson has told people he doesn’t know why he was terminated. According to the source, Scott refused to tell him how the decision was made; she only said that it was made ‘from above.’ Carlson has told people he believes his controversial show is being taken off the air because the Murdoch children intend to sell Fox News at some point,” Vanity Fair added.
In addition, The New York Times reported that Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox Corporation, and Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media, decided on Friday night to fire Carlson.
“The power that Mr. Carlson, 53, wielded outside Fox News could not insulate him from a growing list of troubles inside the network related to his conduct on and off the air, some of which had been grating on Mr. Murdoch and his father, Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, who co-founded the network in 1996, according to the two people with knowledge of the company’s decision,” the Times added.
The NYT report then suggests Carlson’s segment detailing the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was a “point of contention.”
“One early point of contention was Mr. Carlson’s 2021 documentary, ‘Patriot Purge,’ which advanced the conspiracy theory that the attack that day was a so-called false flag operation designed to discredit the former president and his political movement. Lachlan Murdoch was said to have been caught off guard by the program, which also led two conservative Fox News contributors to quit in protest, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes,” the paper noted further.
In a statement read on “Outnumbered,” on Monday host Harris Faulkner briefly stated that the network will have a series of rotating hosts to fill Carlson’s 8 p.m. slot. Fox said Carlson’s last show aired Friday and that starting Monday night, the network will have “an interim show with rotating Fox News personalities until a new host is named.”
