OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former top-rated Fox News host Tucker Carlson has spoken publicly for the first time since the network shocking fired him earlier this week.
He made a short remark after being notified by Politico that some personnel at the Department of Defense were celebrating his exit from the network.
“Ha! I’m sure!” he said, according to Politico, which noted:
From maternity flight suits to diversity policies to Ukraine aid, the military was a favorite punching bag for Tucker Carlson. Now that he’s off the air, some Pentagon officials are quietly cheering his departure.
Carlson’s criticism of Biden-era personnel policies appealed to many of the rank-and-file, which has a large bloc of conservative members. But at the upper levels of the Defense Department, news of Carlson’s firing from Fox News on Monday was met with delight and outright glee in some corners.
“We’re a better country without him bagging on our military every night in front of hundreds of thousands of people,” said one senior DoD official, who like others interviewed for this story was granted anonymity to discuss a politically sensitive topic.
“Good riddance,” a second Pentagon official said.
The firing came as Carlson had been negotiating a new contract that would have reportedly kept him at the network through 2029, according to a report in The Independent. Now, a former top Fox News host thinks he knows the reason why Carlson was let go.
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 the 2020 election.
Fox News just settled a lawsuit with Dominion and agreed to pay out a whopping $787.5 million. 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.”
Bill O’Reilly tells Chris Cuomo why he thinks Tucker Carlson was fired:
“That’s the nature of television news — the most wicked industry in the United States of America.”pic.twitter.com/6BYflhoDUa
— Patriot Alerts (@alerts___) April 26, 2023
Soon after news of Carlson’s firing, reports shed light on who made the final decision to cut ties with the top host.
A new report reveals that Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox Corporation, and Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media, decided on Friday night to fire Carlson.
Then, Scott informed Carlson on 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 chairman of Fox Corporation, who co-founded the network in 1996, according to the two people with knowledge of the company’s decision,” the New York Times reported.
“The host, a polarizing and unpopular figure at the network outside of his own staff, was exposed as part of a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems as a bully who denigrated colleagues and sources, often in profane and sexist language and called for the firing of Fox journalists whose coverage he disliked. He has also drawn condemnation from the right and left for his role in fostering a revisionist account of the assault on the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” the outlet 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 NYT reported.
