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Former Fox News star Tucker Carlson apparently irked network executives when he teased a new Twitter-based show in a video posted to the platform earlier this month, just a few weeks after he was taken off the air.
According to the UK’s Daily Mail, workers contracted by Fox “swooped in and dismantled” a studio the network built for him in a barn in a rural Maine town where he has a home.
“Fox came in last week and got all their sh*t out of there,” Patrick Feeney, Carlson’s construction manager, told the outlet, adding that the set will now have to be completely rebuilt after leaving the barn in “a shambles,” according to the Daily Mail.
“They took the set and everything, all the equipment, the chairs, the desk, the fake walls, everything,” Feeney added.
Now, Carlson himself has joined a three-man work crew at the barn, which is located in downtown Woodstock, to help rebuild the dismantled studio, the outlet reported further, adding:
Carlson, 54, spends his summers in the rural town, 55 miles west of the state capital Augusta, where Fox had built a set in an old barn so he could broadcast the show remotely. He was due to start filming from the satellite studio within a few weeks when he was suddenly fired by the network on April 24.Â
Tucker has since given his own crew a new job, to get the studio back up and running. But the removal of the original set meant they had to repair the infrastructure.
“There’s no hardware in place at all. There’s not even infrastructure for a TV studio for a long time,” Feeney told the Daily Mail.
Carlson also owns a home in Florida and spends much of the year there, but the news outlet quoted Feeney as saying that the former Fox News star returned to Woodstock recently to help with the rebuild.
“He just got back late last night after meeting with lawyers and all that stuff,” Feeney said, adding: “As you can imagine, he’s very, very busy right now.”
Fox News has not officially said why the network took Carlson off the air, but it came shortly after the network settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million, leaving many to conclude that had something to do with it.
During an interview with Chris Cuomo of News Nation, Bill O’Reilly — the former Fox News host who previously occupied the coveted primetime 8 PM time slot — argued that he believes Carlson was fired because the network is facing a slew of lawsuits related to post-2020 election coverage.
The network also has an ongoing lawsuit filed by former Fox News booker Abby Grossberg.
“Because the pending litigation was harpooned this morning. Carlson didn’t know. It just happened. And that’s the nature of television news, the most wicked industry in the United States of America,” O’Reilly said.
“Tucker Carlson took over from me. For the first three years, his ratings were soft. He lost about a million, maybe a little bit more of my audience, and then in 2020, he took a hard right turn,” O’Reilly said. “Carlson basically programmed for a very hard right audience, and his numbers came up.”
Soon after news of Carlson’s firing, reports shed light on who made the final decision to cut ties with the top host.
A report revealed that Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox Corporation, and Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media, decided on a Friday night to fire Carlson.
Scott informed Carlson the following Monday morning of the decision.
“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 New York Times reported.
