Tucker Carlson is a name widely-familiar to Americans. As the host of the biggest Fox News segment to date, with an average of 2.5 million viewers per show, it can be inferred that there was outrage when he was fired on Apr. 24. As of press time, executives have not given a reason for why he was fired, but there are lots of conspiracy theories and plausible guesses from conspirators and other news outlets alike.

In March of 2021, Dominion Voting Systems, an electronic voting company, sued Fox News for $1.6 billion over their false claims of Dominion’s role in the 2020 election. Tucker Carlson, among other major Fox hosts, was singled out in this lawsuit. Two years later, the trial took place, and Dominion already showed a better chance of winning due to what legal experts said was an unprecedented amount of evidence supporting their case. 

Carlson was fired after attorneys went through the discovery process within Fox. Multiple publicized internal documents included emails, text messages and videos that exposed Carlson’s off-screen behavior to the world. Select documents revealed him referring to someone’s girlfriend as “kind of yummy,” calling his fans “postmenopausal” and having a sexually-explicit conversation with Piers Morgan, another broadcaster, before an interview.

One of the biggest reasons people speculate he was fired is not, in fact, the gross behavior he presented in most documents, but the multiple emails released wherein he criticized and ridiculed the founder of Fox News, Keith Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch’s business style has long been described as “reverse ferret”. This means that when a corporation of his starts to come under fire, instead of addressing the issue, the entire organization pulls a 180 and reverses its position on the subject, often without acknowledging their original stance. Legal experts have speculated that the emails were embarrassing enough that Murdoch would feel like he had to let go of Carlson, especially since he was already losing his allegiance.

An anonymous student in the Broadcast Technology class at TuHS shared their opinion on the topic. 

“I know a lot of people either like him or hate him, and there’s often no in between. I think it’s a step back for Fox because he was one of their top earners. In general, it’s a step forward because he wasn’t the best person, in my opinion.”

It has become obvious that Tucker Carlson’s career was in jeopardy, regardless of how the lawsuit played out, considering that Fox News paid $787 million to Dominion to settle the case five days before Carlson’s firing. Overall, it was likely a large chain of events that led to Carlson being let go, including controversial theories about immigration, accusations of white supremacy and his outspoken hatred towards Trump despite his massive right-wing audience. Carlson’s critics agree that this can only be a positive change because of the harmful ideals Carlson projected against immigration and transgender representation. There is much to be lost within Fox, seeing as they just fired their most popular asset, and so far their channel-wide viewership has fallen 29 percent since April 24.