Tucker Carlson, the far-right Fox News host, is set to exit the channel, the network has just announced.
“Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor,” Fox said in a statement on Monday.
The statement added, “Mr. Carlson’s last program was Friday, April 21st. Fox News Tonight will air live at 8 pm/ET starting this evening as an interim show helmed by rotating Fox News personalities until a new host is named.”
The announcement came a few days after the network agreed to pay $787.5m to settle a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems.
The network had been severely embarrassed by revelations in pre-trial court filling from the Dominican lawsuit about its coverage in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential elections.
Recall that Mr Carlson and fellow hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham privately mocked regular guests such as Donald Trump’s attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
The trio continued to promote their lies and conspiracy theories to their audience.
Specifically, Mr Carlson called Mr Trump a “demonic force”, and said that he hated the former president “passionately” in text messages to an unknown Fox employee.
The hosts were spared having to testify at trial when Dominion and Fox News reached a last-gasp $787.5 settlement on Tuesday after a jury had already been sworn in.
Mr Carlson, 53, began hosting his 8:00 p.m. Fox News show ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ in November 2016.
He quickly became a rating juggernaut for the network, and in June 2020 became the most-watched show on cable news attracting an average of four million viewers.
The show was heavily criticised for amplifying racist, anti-immigrant, homophobic, and transphobic themes.
In 2018, Mr Carlson said that immigration had made the United States “poorer, dirtier, and more divided”.
This forced advertisers to flee the show but Fox Corporation CEO, Lachlan Murdoch resisted calls to rein him in.
