Tucker Carlson Out at Fox News

metroweekly.com:

settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which sued the network for allegedly airing false claims about the 2020 election.Fox News ultimately agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million to resolve the lawsuit, without having to issue an apology for the statements in question.As part of discovery, Dominion sought out internal communications at Fox News, some of which were made public.

According to The Washington Post, those communications included text messages from Carlson. The news host expressed skepticism of election-fraud claims made on air by Trump’s attorneys and allegedly claimed to “passionately” hate the former president.Carlson, 53, first emerged as a right-wing pundit as a writer for the Weekly Standard magazine, eventually moving to CNN’s long-heralded public policy debate show Crossfire, where he became more of a household name.He later hosted a prime-time show on liberal-leaning MSNBC and co-founded the conservative Daily Caller website before landing a Prime Time slot at Fox News shortly after the 2016 election.Within a few years, Carlson had eclipsed his 9 p.m.

counterpart, Sean Hannity, as the network’s most-watched host, netting an average of more than 3 million viewers a night.His show also became a platform for conservative politicians, including former President Trump, to get their message out to a friendly audience and further their political ambitions.Carlson’s relentless focus on culture-war issues as part of his nightly shows helped him gain traction among a growing segment of right-wing populists who saw the Trump administration as an ally against big government, “Big Tech,” mainstream media, and liberal elites who do not share their political, religious, or social.