Tucker Carlson‘s Cancellation At Fox News Takes Effect Immediately

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Surprisingly, Tucker Carlson will evidently not be returning to the airwaves on Fox with his regularly scheduled program.

A press release from Fox began circulating online on Monday revealing the news. Carlson’s departure from the network was sudden, as the press release indicated his exit was immediate, with no additional shows beyond the program he hosted last Friday — when remarks he made on the air suggested he expected to return. The revelation evidently tracing to a Fox entity of Carlson leaving the airwaves didn’t include any details about specific reasons for Carlson’s show suddenly ending, although it’s difficult to not see the move at least somewhat connected to Fox recently entering into a settlement arrangement with the election technology company Dominion Voting Systems that would see it pay three-quarters of a billion dollars for its role in propagating election lies. Still, that’s just conjecture, and there weren’t immediately available details about reasons for the departure.

Carlson has consistently helped spread lies and damagingly deceptive claims, including recently his false insistence that American troops were, in fact, fighting on the ground in Ukraine against Russian troops. It’s not just PR that could be affected by Carlson’s lies. Imagine the kind of blowback that could grow if Carlson’s lies were taken further.

The U.S. and Russia have often proven to be military adversaries, no matter the treaties that have sometimes accompanied a decline in tensions. What if American leaders on the far-right ran even further with the lie the U.S. was secretly fighting Russia and Russian leaders wanted to stage some kind of purported response, whether deceived by the claims (they’re not known these days for military fortitude) or just using an excuse? Carlson has also tried to characterize actions by so-called Western interests as somehow substantially involved in sparking the war in Ukraine, a largely nonsensical notion per the basic facts.

On the defamation litigation front, Fox is still facing another massive lawsuit from the fellow election technology firm Smartmatic, which could go to trial in 2025 and is evidently in the discovery phase, meaning the pretrial period in which the respective parties collect relevant materials in the form of evidence and depositions. A lawyer for Smartmatic said in a recent CNN interview the company team was interested in a financial penalty on Fox higher than what Dominion secured in its settlement.