Tucker Carlson And Don Lemon Firings Show Ruthless Side Of Cable News

There’s every reason to believe that neither Tucker Carlson nor Don Lemon woke up Monday morning knowing that they’d be dropped by their networks by lunchtime.

When Carlson signed off Friday evening from his top-rated show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, he told viewers he’d see them back again on Monday. Don Lemon, co-host of CNN This Morning, was in the anchor chair Monday, and featured in on-air promotions that ran later in the morning. Neither man was given the chance to deliver an on-air farewell—a telltale move that usually happens when a network decides to fire its talent, and doesn’t trust them to go out gracefully.

Even without knowing exactly what senior leaders at Fox
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and CNN were thinking when they decided that Carlson and Lemon had to go, the decisions boiled down to cable news being a business. Even if you are the highest-rated host in cable news as Carlson was or a 17-year CNN veteran as Lemon was, you’re gone when you become a liability to the company’s bottom line. You’re part of the network family on a Friday, and by Monday it’s like you never existed.

Carlson was the first to fall. It was just before 11:30 a.m. ET when Fox News released a short statement announcing that the highest-rated host on the Fox News Channel was out, effective immediately. The network said Carlson and Fox had “agreed to part ways,” which is language similar to that used when Fox announced last week that Saturday night host Dan Bongino had left the network. Bongino said it was “a sad day,” and described it not as a firing, but failure to reach agreement on a new contract. Carlson, however, was in the middle of a multi-year contract he signed back in 2021, when he said “this is my 12th year at Fox News and I’ve never been more grateful to be here.”

As the news of Carlson’s sudden departure from Fox News rippled through social media—and made news on each of the cable news networks—Don Lemon posted a statement to his Twitter account just after 12 p.m. saying that he’d been fired by CNN. Lemon said he’d gotten the news not from the network, but from his agent—a claim CNN said was false. “He was offered an opportunity to meet with management but instead released a statement on Twitter,” the network said via its CNN Communications public relations account on Twitter.

Lemon, a former host in prime time on CNN, had been co-host of CNN This Morning, the network’s revamped morning program that has struggled in the ratings since its launch last year, and which has been the subject of media reports indicating tension between Lemon and his co-hosts, Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins. The show was the first piece of a network-wide retooling by CEO Chris Licht, who said in a statement that “CNN and Don have parted ways,” but the morning show, essentially, would go on without him. “CNN This Morning has been on the air for nearly six months and we are committed to its success.”

While CNN This Morning has so far failed to reverse the network’s ratings woes—the show’s heavily-promoted debut actually lost viewers compared to the show it replaced, CNN New Day. But insiders say Lemon’s firing wasn’t about ratings. In February, Lemon was suspended after making sexist comments about Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. He agreed to undergo sensitivity training, and made no apology upon his return to the morning show.

“Allies of Mr. Lemon had hoped he would turn the page from the incident, but executives at CNN gradually concluded that his future at CNN had become untenable,” reported The New York Times

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, citing sources inside the network, adding that “in recent weeks, CNN’s bookers had discovered that some guests did not want to appear on-air with Mr. Lemon, and research on the morning show reviewed by CNN executives found that his popularity with audiences had fallen”

“If you get to a point where the corporation feels you’re a liability,” said former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in an interview Monday night on NewsNation. O’Reilly was Fox’s highest-rated host when he was forced out in 2017 amid a sexual harassment investigation. “Don Lemon was a ratings liability for CNN. Okay, if he had been winning the morning news race, he never would have been let go. But if you get to a point where you’re a liability—or so the moguls think—you’re gone. It doesn’t matter how loyal you’ve been, how hard you work, how much money, no human being on this planet could have made more money for a company than I did for Fox News. No human being on the planet.”

For Tucker Carlson, ratings were clearly not a factor. Tucker Carlson Tonight has been the highest-rated show in cable news for years, regularly drawing an audience of more than 3 million viewers. For many conservatives, Carlson was Fox News, and his sudden ouster led the hashtag #DoneWithFox to trend throughout the day on Twitter. Roger Stone, a former adviser to Donald Trump, said that Fox had “essentially canceled the single most influential conservative commentator in the country, at the same time killing a cash cow for the network.”

Another Trump adviser, Steve Bannon, said on his podcast that “with this I don’t know why anybody needs to watch anything on the Murdoch empire, because Tucker was the mainstay of the the populist voice over at Fox.”

The decision to cut ties with Carlson—a move that came just a week after Fox News settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787 million—led many to speculate that Carlson was fired as part of a housecleaning of hosts whose damagin private messages were leaked in pre-trial filings in the Dominion case. The messages had shown that hosts like Carlson privately dismissed claims of a “rigged” election being made by Donald Trump and his supporters, but on the air Carlson and others seemed to be supporting and encouraging talk the 2020 election had been “stolen.”

But former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said Monday on her SiriusXM show that “if this is a reaction to the Dominion lawsuit, why is Maria Bartiromo there? Why is Jeanine Pirro still there? Why is Suzanne Scott still there? The CEO of Fox News. She got them in far more trouble with her executive emails panicking about Dominion and the audience than anything Tucker did behind the scenes.”

“Carlson has told people he doesn’t know why he was terminated,” writes Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair. “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.”

The Los Angeles Times reported that the decision to fire Carlson was made by Rupert Murdoch and was related to the discrimination lawsuit filed by Abby Grossberg, a former Fox News producer producer who was fired by the network last month. Grossberg worked on Tucker Carlson Tonight, and in her lawsuit she said she was bullied and subjected to antisemitic comments. Another reported factor in Carlson’s firing was his reporting on the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, where Carlson suggested the attack was organized by government agents.