Top-rated According to reports, Fox News host Tucker Carlson was “blindsided” on Monday when he received a phone call from CEO Suzanne Scott informing him of his dismissal.

According to an Independent report, Carlson was fired as he was negotiating a new contract that would have kept him at the network through 2029. Now, a former Fox News host believes he understands why Carlson was fired.

During an interview with News Nation’s Chris Cuomo, former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly argued that he believes Tucker Carlson was fired because the network is facing a slew of lawsuits related to the 2020 presidential election.

Fox News recently settled a lawsuit with Dominion for a staggering $787 million. Abby Grossberg, a former Fox News booker, has also filed a lawsuit against the network.

“Because the pending litigation was harpooned this morning. Carlson didn’t know. It just happened. And that’s the nature of television news, the most wicked industry in the United States of America,” O’Reilly said.

“Tucker Carlson took over from me. For the first three years, his ratings were soft. He lost about a million, maybe a little bit more of my audience, and then in 2020 he took a hard right turn,” O’Reilly said. “Carlson basically programmed for a very hard right audience and his numbers came up.”

WATCH:

Bill O’Reilly tells Chris Cuomo why he thinks Tucker Carlson was fired:

“That’s the nature of television news — the most wicked industry in the United States of America.”pic.twitter.com/6BYflhoDUa

— Patriot Alerts (@alerts___) April 26, 2023

Soon after the announcement of Carlson’s dismissal, reports cast light on the ultimate decision-maker.

Lachlan Murdoch, the CEO of Fox Corporation, and Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News Media, decided to terminate Tucker Carlson on Friday night, according to a new report.

Scott then apprised Carlson of the decision on Monday morning.

“The power that Mr. Carlson, 53, wielded outside Fox News could not insulate him from a growing list of troubles inside the network related to his conduct on and off the air, some of which had been grating on Mr. Murdoch and his father, Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, who co-founded the network in 1996, according to the two people with knowledge of the company’s decision,” the New York Times reported.

“The host, a polarizing and unpopular figure at the network outside of his own staff, was exposed as part of a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems as a bully who denigrated colleagues and sources, often in profane and sexist language and called for the firing of Fox journalists whose coverage he disliked. He has also drawn condemnation from the right and left for his role in fostering a revisionist account of the assault on the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” the outlet added.

The NYT report indicates that Carlson’s segment on the disturbance at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a “point of contention.”

“One early point of contention was Mr. Carlson’s 2021 documentary, ‘Patriot Purge,’ which advanced the conspiracy theory that the attack that day was a so-called false flag operation designed to discredit the former president and his political movement. Lachlan Murdoch was said to have been caught off guard by the program, which also led two conservative Fox News contributors to quit in protest, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes,” the NYT reported.

More on this story via Conservative Brief:

“In March, Mr. Carlson edited down tens of thousands of hours of footage from the attack given to him by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and used them to falsely portray the rioters as people Mr. Carlson called ‘mostly peaceful’ onlookers who had innocently ambled into the Capitol. The broadcast drew a rebuke from Senator Mitch McConnell, who is a friend of Rupert Murdoch’s and said Mr. Carlson had drawn ‘offensive and misleading conclusions,’” the outlet continued. CONTINUE READING…