Megyn Kelly Slams Fox News Decision to Part With Tucker Carlson, Defends Don Lemon

Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly is condemning Tucker Carlson's exit from the network and backing Don Lemon's complaints amid his exit from CNN. Kelly, who left Fox News in 2017, spoke plainly as she discussed the network shakeup during Monday's episode of SiriusXM's The Megyn Kelly Show, calling Carlson's departure from Fox News a "terrible move" by the company and a "great thing" for the political commentator. 

"I don't know what drove Fox News to make this decision, and it was clearly Fox News's decision because they're not letting him say goodbye," she said. "I think this is a massive error. I think this is a massive misjudgment of what their audience wants." The network announced Monday morning, "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." 

Carlson's last appearance was Friday, and the network now plans to air Fox News Tonight in the interim with a rotating panel of hosts until a permanent decision is made. Kelly speculated that Carlson's firing may have been the result of Fox's recent settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, which sued the network for its propagation of baseless conspiracies of widespread election fraud in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.

Kelly wondered why Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott were still employed if Carlson's involvement in the lawsuit was what led to his exit. "[Scott] got them in far more trouble with her executive emails panicking about Dominion and the audience than anything Tucker did behind the scenes," Kelly said, adding that "internally at Fox, they always had that gauge, at least under Roger Ailes, of how to ignore those critics and do what was right for the channel and its audience and the truth." When it comes to what's next for Carlson, Kelly predicted that this will be a "great" next chapter for him as she reasons he goes independent with a podcast or digital show "and crushes it."

Kelly also showed her support for CNN's Lemon, who was similarly ousted from the network Monday before complaining his agent was the one who broke the big news to him. "After 17 years at CNN I would have thought that someone in management would have had the decency to tell me directly," he wrote on Twitter. CNN Communications soon after tweeted that Lemon's statement was "inaccurate," writing that the journalist was "offered an opportunity to meet with management but instead released a statement on Twitter."

The former Megyn Kelly Today host noted, "He's not wrong. I mean, everybody knows I'm not exactly Don Lemon's fan, but he's not wrong that if that's true, that he was just told by his agent he was fired and they didn't have the balls to tell him man-to-man," Kelly opined. "I mean, that's just classless. He's got a right to complain about that."