Fox News And Tucker Carlson Part Ways

Fox News has announced that it has parted ways with Tucker Carlson, the network’s highest-rated prime time host. “Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” the network said in a statement. “We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”

The announcement comes days after Fox announced that one of its weekend hosts, Dan Bongino, had left the network after failing to reach agreement on a new contract. At the time, many of Bongino’s supporters speculated that the end of his Saturday night show, Unfiltered with Dan Bongino, may have been part of a wider house cleaning at the network tied to Fox’s $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems—something a network insider said was not the case.

Fox said Carlson’s Tucker Carlson Tonight had its last episode Friday April 21^st. Starting tonight a fill-in show, Fox News Tonight, will air live at 8 p.m. ET. The show will be hosted “by rotating Fox News personalities until a new host is named,” the network said.

Carlson’s sudden exit represents a massive change for the dominant network in cable news. For the week ending April 16, Tucker Carlson Tonight was the most-watched show for the week, with a total audience of 3.389 million viewers, and 419,000 viewers in the key demo of adults 25-54. The next highest-rated show was Fox News Channel’s The Five, which had 3.015 million viewers. The Five airs outside prime time, with FNC’s next highest-rated prime time hour after Carlson’s being Hannity, which delivered a total audience of 2.607 million viewers.

In recent weeks, Fox promoted two high profile interviews Carlson conducted: one with former President Donald Trump, and another with Elon Musk. Carlson’s interview with Trump was a huge ratings success, drawing 6.7 million viewers, which was Tucker Carlson Tonight’s highest-rated night since 2020. It was in June of 2020 that Carlson finished the second quarter of the year with an average total audience of 4.331 million viewers—setting a record for the highest-rated quarter of any cable news program in history.

Carlson was one of the Fox News hosts whose private comments about Donald Trump and his false claims of the 2020 election being “stolen” were made public as part of pre-trial filings in Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox. The private messages revealed that Carlson privately said the claims being made by Trump and his supporters were baseless, but on the air seemed supportive. In leaked messages, Carlson said he “passionately” hated former President Donald Trump and that Trump’s presidency was a “disaster.” Carlson was among the top Fox News figures set to testify in the Dominion trial before the network’s last-minute settlement ended the case.

Fox’s critics used Carlson’s words as proof that Fox News lied to its viewers, with Media Matters putting trucks emblazoned with Carlson’s quotes on the streets outside Fox News headquarters in New York and the courthouse in Delaware where the Dominion trial was set to be heard.

Regardless of the reasons for Carlson’s departure, the host’s sudden exit represents the largest change in the network’s top-rated prime time lineup since Bill O’Reilly was forced out in 2017. At the time, The O’Reilly Factor was FNC’s highest-rated show.