Tucker Carlson, the host of Fox News' top-rated show ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’, will be leaving the network, effective immediately. This comes a week after Fox settled a $787 million defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, the company informed.
“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,” the company said in a statement.
His last show was on Friday, the network said.
Last week, Fox settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for over $787 million, acknowledging that their reporting on the 2020 election was incorrect and allowed false charges of election fraud to be amplified.
Although Tucker Carlson's show was not specifically mentioned in the settlement, his name was brought up due to private messages that were revealed during the case.
These messages showed that Carlson and other Fox hosts doubted their network's allegations about Dominion's role in the supposed election fraud while also being concerned about losing their Trump-supporting audience. Some of Carlson's private messages even included criticism of Donald Trump, saying he hated him passionately, where he said he hated him passionately.
Carlson became Fox’s most popular personality after replacing Bill O’Reilly in Fox’s prime-time lineup in 2016. He’s also consistently drawn headline for controversial coverage, including most recently airing tapes from the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection to minimize the impact of the deadly attack.
Carlson was recently named in a lawsuit filed by Abby Grossberg, a Fox News producer fired after claiming that Fox lawyers had pressured her to give misleading testimony in the Dominion lawsuit. Grossberg had gone to work for Carlson after leaving Maria Bartiromo's Fox show.
Her lawsuit says that Grossberg learned “she had merely traded in one overtly misogynistic work environment for an event crueler one — this time, one where unprofessionalism reigned supreme, and the staff’s distaste and disdain for women infiltrated almost every workday decision.”
(With inputs from agencies)
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