Who Is Taking Over for Tucker Carlson on 'Fox News Tonight'?
Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson is leaving the network immediately, Fox News Media announced Monday, with his show, now named Fox News Tonight set to air in the interim hosted by rotating network personalities until a permanent new host is named. The show will air live at 8 p.m. ET Monday as usual, but the first interim host has yet to be announced.
Carlson will also not receive any formal sendoff, as his last episode on Tucker Carlson Tonight aired Friday, during which Carlson tellingly stated he would be back for Monday's show. Monday morning, the company released a statement reading, "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 exit comes just days after Fox News' parent company settled its Dominion Voting Systems' defamation lawsuit for $787.5 million on Tuesday. The network was sued for defamation after baselessly accusing Dominion of rigging its voting machines against former President Donald Trump in 2020, and the lawsuit had Fox gearing up for what was going to be one of the most-watched media lawsuits in decades, with Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Carlson expected to testify.
Damning court documents that exposed the inner workings of Fox News were already made public prior to the settlement, showing executives concerned about losing viewers after Fox decided to correctly declare Trump's loss of the state of Arizona to President Joe Biden. While pushing the narrative of voting fraud, several of the largest names at Fox were also revealed to privately be having other thoughts, with Tucker being quoted as hating Trump "passionately" and thinking his presidency had been disastrous.
The network is facing a second, similar lawsuit from voting technology firm Smartmatic, which is seeking an even larger sum of $2.7 billion from Fox, claiming that the company knowingly aired more than 100 false statements against the company in a bid to "capitalise on President Trump's popularity by inventing a story" around the 2020 election. "[Fox] had an obvious problem with their story. They needed a villain," the complaint reads, as per the BBC. "Without any true villain, defendants invented one. Defendants decided to make Smartmatic the villain in their story."