Why Tucker Carlson Was Fired From Fox News – Hw

On Friday night, April 21st, 2023, Tucker Carlson ended his show the way he always does. Calm voice, small smile, “We’ll be back on Monday.” But by Monday morning, he was gone. There was no final episode, no farewell, or even an explanation. Just 16 words from Fox News. “Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways.

” The most watched man in cable news, 3 million viewers a night, the top-rated primetime program in all of cable, deleted from the schedule between breakfast and lunch. Six days earlier, Fox had paid $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit. That lawsuit had forced something into the open that Fox could not pay to bury.

Thousands of internal texts from inside the network. And in those texts, Tucker Carlson was keeping a secret from his Fox audience, and that secret could change how they see him. On November 3rd, 2020, during the election night, Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden. It was the first network to do it, ahead of every competitor.

And the call was correct, but it was also a catastrophe. Fox didn’t expect what that call would do to its own audience. The audience didn’t just disagree, they left. They switched to a smaller rival called Newsmax. And within days, Newsmax primetime numbers were spiking in ways the network had never seen. And inside Fox, the man running the senior Washington bureau put the crisis into one sentence in a text to a colleague.

“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.” That text would surface 2 years later inside a lawsuit. But wait a bit, cuz I’m going to get to that part. The thing is, Fox had not lost the election night audience because it called Arizona for Biden. It lost them because I think the audience was never really loyal to Fox.

They were loyal to a worldview, and Fox had just stopped delivering it. Fox needed someone who could hold its audience, and they had just met the man. Tucker Carlson was already the network’s most watched host. After Bill O’Reilly was pushed out over sexual harassment settlements in April of 2017, Tucker had inherited the 8:00 p.m.

slot and grown it into the highest-rated primetime program on all of cable by July 2020. And after election night 2020, he became something more than a ratings leader. He became the bridge between Fox and an audience that Fox had just enraged. The audience that had turned to Tucker in November of 2020 trusted him, and Tucker delivered on that trust.

He gave them doubt about Dominion. He echoed their thoughts that asking questions about the elections was their constitutional right, and to dismiss those questions was itself a form of dishonesty. He connects the audience to Sidney Powell and her claims about rigged machines. He said he hoped that she’d come forward with the details.

That’s the Tucker Carlson his audience believed in. But, the problem is that that Tucker Carlson also had a phone, and on that phone he was saying something else entirely. This started within days of the Arizona call. On November 16th, 2020, Tucker texted a producer after watching Sidney Powell make her claims about rigged Dominion machines, the stolen election, and the conspiracy of historic scale.

“Sidney Powell is lying,” he wrote. And those texts were just the beginning. Two days later, he texted Laura Ingraham. “Sidney Powell is lying, by the way. I caught her. It’s insane.” He called Powell an unguided missile and dangerous as hell. Ingraham agreed. She replied, “Sidney is a complete nut.

No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” Then Tucker added, “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people, and they believe it. Did you catch that? Those texts showed that Tucker cared about his audience and found the thought of them being deceived offensive. At least that’s what I personally got from the text.

But what I find absurd is that he kept booking her anyway and never told his audience what he truly thought. And Powell was only the beginning. By January 4th, 2021, two days before the Capitol riot, Tucker was texting about Trump himself. We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. In the same exchange, he declared, “I hate him passionately.

” Three days later, the morning after January 6th, he texted his producer, “He’s a demonic force, a destroyer.” And in a separate message from the same period, he assessed the previous four years with a bluntness that never made it to the broadcast. “There isn’t really an upside to Trump.” So every night, Tucker Carlson performed one version of himself in front of 3 million people watching him.

Every night, he was being another version of himself with friends and co-workers over the phone. He had to live with both versions at once. For two years, that arrangement held. Tucker kept broadcasting. The texts kept accumulating. Nobody outside a small circle of producers and colleagues knew what was in them.

Then in March 2021, Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for $1.6 billion. They filed in court that Fox had knowingly broadcast false claims about its machines. The lawsuit set in motion a discovery process. This wasn’t a leak or a whistleblower scenario. Fox had a legal obligation and no choice but to hand over its internal communications.

Tens of thousands of messages, unfiltered, whatever was on those servers. The texts Tucker had been writing since November 2020 were now a part of court record. And what the files showed was not one host having a bad night. It was the whole infrastructure of the network. Tucker, Hannity, Ingram, executives, producers, all of them privately said the opposite of what they were broadcasting.

Dominion’s lawyers put it plainly in their brief. From the top down, Fox knew the Dominion stuff was total BS. And that matters a lot because it means Tucker was not a rogue element inside a credulous institution. He was just the most visible example of a network filled with people who didn’t believe what they were saying.

The lawsuit exposed his secret and made it impossible to defend Tucker. By late 2022, with the Dominion trial approaching, a second pressure was building inside the network. Abby Grossberg had joined Tucker’s show in September 2022 as head of booking, moving over from Maria Bartiromo’s program.

She lasted less than 5 months before seeking medical leave for anxiety and depression. Then, in March of 2023, she filed a lawsuit. She described what she had found when she arrived. Images of Nancy Pelosi in a bikini pinned around the office walls. A senior producer with an obscenity written on a mirror on his desk. Jewish colleagues mocked for their faith.

Women dismissed and underpaid. When she’d complained to a supervisor about it, his response was simple, “We’re just following Tucker’s tone.” That part bothered me because Fox staff were accusing Tucker of another thing entirely, and it looked much darker than text talking smack about Sidney Powell and Donald Trump. So, which is the real Tucker? As you ponder your answer, like this video and subscribe to Top Rewind.

I’m going to tell you stories that others are afraid to tell. Fox fired Grossberg after she filed. She sued them for that, too, adding a second case alleging Fox’s own lawyers had pressured her to give misleading testimony in the Dominion proceeding. Fox would eventually settle both suits for $12 million. dollars. And back to Tucker himself, at some point during the Dominion proceedings, he found out Fox’s lawyers had convinced a judge to keep his most damaging texts redacted in the public filings.

He wasn’t relieved. He told colleagues he wanted the world to know what he thought of Fox management, the vulgar messages about senior executives, the contempt that he’d been carrying for years while smiling through the commercial break. I got to admit I find this part intriguing. Tucker went from a man who knew his audience was being deceived and didn’t publicly do anything other than send private texts to acting like he wanted to bring the network that allowed this down.

Had he decided that he was bigger than the network that signed his checks? On April 17th, 2023, Fox’s board reviewed a text Tucker sent on January 7th, 2021. The New York Times would later report its contents through multiple sources close to the case. In it, Tucker described watching a video of what he calls Trump supporters attacking someone on the street.

He wrote about a violent impulse he felt watching it, but caught himself and pulled back. Then, in the middle of the text, he wrote a line about how white men fight. The board read all of this and saw a legal catastrophe. Tucker was expected to testify, and the trial was soon, and this text was still in the discovery file.

The board authorized Fox to retain Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz, one of the most powerful corporate law firms in the country, to investigate Tucker’s conduct. Tucker, who helped Fox keep their audience, was being formally investigated by his own bosses’ outside lawyers. But still, he was on air every night. Now, I don’t want to make assumptions for him, but I have this instinct that he must have felt the clock ticking on his time with Fox.

On April 18th, Fox settled with Dominion for 787.5 million dollars. Tucker never testified because the trial never happened. Fox could breathe easier now, but the settlement didn’t close the file on Tucker. It opened the question, what should Fox do about a host who is averaging 3 million viewers a night, is generating lawsuits, has privately raged at management in messages that could surface at any moment, and told his colleagues that he wants the world to read what he really thinks of the people running the network that he works for.

Well, Fox’s answer took exactly 6 days. On April 24th, Lachlan Murdoch and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott authorized Tucker’s firing. There was no call to him advance by most accounts. And his executive producer, Justin Wells, 15 years at Fox, was also out. By that afternoon, the 8:00 p.m. slot is being filled by a rotating cast.

But remember, the audience Tucker had built was not loyal to the Fox News brand. It was loyal to Tucker himself personally. They were loyal to his voice, his framing, and his way of looking at the world. Fox had assumed for 7 years that those were the same thing. They weren’t. When it fired Tucker, it didn’t reclaim the audience, it released it.

Some went to Newsmax, some followed Tucker directly to X, some stopped watching cable news entirely. The building stayed open, the viewers walked out with the man they came to see. Brian Kilmeade filled in that first night when Tucker left. The slot drew 2.6 million viewers, decent by any normal standard, except Tucker had averaged over 3 million in his final week. Within 2 weeks, the 8:00 p.m.

audience in the key 25 to 54 advertising demographic dropped roughly 50%. Newsmax, which had been pulling 146,000 viewers in that hour, hit 531,000 the night Tucker was fired. Tucker did not disappear quietly. Within days, his attorneys sent Fox a letter claiming the network had broken its promises to him. They claimed this was a breach of contract that should free him from his non-compete clause.

So, he launched a new show on X, the platform formerly known [clears throat] as Twitter. Fox sent a cease and desist. He kept on going anyway. And eventually, the two sides reached a quiet arrangement. Four months after the firing, he sat down with Donald Trump, the man he’d privately called a demonic force and a destroyer, for an interview on X timed deliberately to run opposite Fox’s first Republican primary debate.

Trump skipped the debate to do it. Tucker campaigned for him through 2024. He was at the Republican National Convention, speaking from the stage. He spent that year in the room where it counted. And then, on April 21st, 2026, 3 years after his last segment for Fox, Tucker Carlson sat down with his brother Buckley and said this, “I do think it’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences.

We’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say, I’m sorry for misleading people.” Before the apology, Trump had 2 weeks earlier, on April 9th, posted on Truth Social that Tucker and other critics have one thing in common, “low IQs.” Tucker’s son, who had been working as deputy press secretary in Vice President Vance’s office, had already given notice in December.

He left in April. The timing looked connected. According to Politico, it wasn’t. You could read the apology as a change of heart. But, when you could read the January 21 text that Tucker wrote about Trump, you’ll notice that the apology was not new. The difference was that in 2026, he said what he thought to a camera instead of through text. Fox News survived firing him.

The institution absorbed the cost and kept moving. Tucker Carlson was only removed from the building, but not his audience. The secrets he kept are now out in the open. But, I keep coming back to the same thought. The The who performed one version of himself for 3 million people every night hasn’t stopped performing.

The audience just got bigger. I’ll see you next time on Top Rewind.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.