Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News, network says | CBC News

Fox News said in a statement on Monday that it had parted ways with controversial host Tucker Carlson.

“We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor,” the network said in a statement.

Carlson, after appearing on CNN’s Crossfire and on PBS and MSNBC, joined Fox News in 2009. His Tucker Carlson Tonight show took an increasingly provocative turn.

Fox last week settled a defamation lawsuit with Toronto-founded Dominion Voting Systems for $787 million US. It faces a similar lawsuit from voting technology company Smartmatic, for $2.7 billion US in damages.

During the discovery phase of the Dominion trial, Carlson was among the Fox News personalities privately expressing doubts about voting machine fraud claims made by then-U.S. president Donald Trump and his allies.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” he texted to an unidentified person in early 2021. “I hate him passionately…. I can’t handle much more of this.”

But Carlson’s on-air shows gave no hint of such skepticism in the weeks after the contentious 2020 election. Just this month Carlson sat down for what was widely viewed as a friendly, non-confrontational interview with Trump.

‘Non-literal commentary’

Handed some 41,000 hours of Jan. 6 security footage, Carlson last month launched an impassioned new effort to explain away the deadly Capitol Riot attack, linking the Republican Party ever more closely to pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the 2021 riot. The effort dovetails with the work of Republicans on Capitol Hill, led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who turned over the security footage to Fox.

“These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers,” Carlson said during a March broadcast.

Carlson in his show has also expressed alarm at migrants amassing at the southern U.S. border and has made crime stories in cities run by Democratic officials a regular feature of his program.

Defending Carlson from a defamation lawsuit brought by former Playboy model Karen McDougal — who alleges an affair with Trump — Fox’s lawyers argued that Carlson engaged in “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary.”

“Given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism,” the judge ruled while tossing the lawsuit.

There was no immediate explanation on Monday from Fox about why Carlson was leaving, even as it comes just days after the Dominion settlement.

Not the first controversial host

Dominion in 2021 sued Fox Corp. and Fox News, contending that its business was ruined by the false vote-rigging claims that were aired by the influential American cable news outlet and its conservative commentators. One of those commentators, Lou Dobbs, departed the network that same year.

Based on a slew of internal communications, Dominion alleged that Fox staff, from newsroom employees all the way up to Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, knew the statements were false but continued to air them out of fear of losing viewers to media competitors on the right.

Carlson became Fox’s most popular personality after replacing Bill O’Reilly in Fox’s prime-time lineup. O’Reilly left in early 2017 after 20 years at the network and multiple sexual harassment lawsuits.

Fox said rotating hosts would helm Fox News Tonight at 8 p.m. ET on an interim basis.