Fox News never thought Tucker would go this far.
He has left them in serious danger of going out of business.
Now Fox News is regretting letting Tucker go after this one ultimatum.
Tucker Carlson is not going quietly into the good night. He’s letting the world know what really happened between him and Fox News.
And Fox News is paying the price for it.
According to The Guardian, “Tucker Carlson ‘knows’ he was fired by Fox News in April as a condition of the $787.5m settlement with Dominion Voting Systems regarding the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lie about election fraud, the former host says in a new book.”
“They agreed to take me off the air, my show off the air, as a condition of the Dominion settlement,” Carlson tells his biographer, Chadwick Moore. “They had to settle this; Rupert [Murdoch, the 92-year-old Fox News owner] couldn’t testify. I think that deal was made minutes before the trial started.”
“I mean, I know it was.”
This is shocking information that doesn’t make Fox News look good. Afterall, Fox News created this situation for themselves – first by getting themselves in legal trouble, and then by agreeing to this catastrophic settlement.
Now their network is losing massive and historic numbers of viewers in the wake of Carlson’s departure.
The Wall Street Journal reports, “Conservative news channel Newsmax saw its prime-time viewership more than double in the second quarter, as it held on to a good chunk of the gains it made following the departure of Tucker Carlson from rival Fox News.”
“Newsmax drew 247,000 prime-time viewers in the period, through June 25, compared with 111,000 in the first quarter.”
These gains aren’t being made in a vacuum. They are directly coming out of Fox News’ audience.
The WSJ continues, “Newsmax’s surge has corresponded with a decline in Fox News’s prime-time ratings following Carlson’s exit. The network’s ratings declined 22% in the second quarter, to about 1.7 million prime-time viewers, though it remains the most-watched cable news network.”
Newsmax has a long way to go before it becomes one of the elite cable news networks, however.
“Newsmax still trails the largest cable channels by a considerable margin. Sustaining and building on its gains will be challenging, especially as the industry faces challenges such as accelerated cable cord-cutting and an aging viewership base,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
It remains to be seen whether they can close the gap, but Tucker’s departure from Fox News is clearly helping them.
And with Fox on the hook for $787.5 million – and losing viewers like never before – their business might really be in trouble.
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