On Monday, April 24th, Fox News announced they would be parting ways with Tucker Carlson, the host of the Fox News segment “Tucker Carlson Tonight” since 2016. Carlson was known for his conservative beliefs, hate for “big media”, and “us vs. them” attitude. Carlson was the face of Fox News for 7 years. It came as an absolute shock, then, when he announced his resignation, giving no reason for why. 

While nothing official has been released, fans of the show have been speculating on what could have caused his abrupt departure. One reason fans suspect is Fox’s recently settled defamation lawsuit. In this case, Dominion Voting Systems asked $1.6 billion from Fox for their lies about the legitimacy of the voting systems. In this case, Carlson’s text messages were used as evidence, one of them being “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane.” Sydney Powell was part of Donald Trump’s legal team trying to overturn Biden’s victory in the presidential election. Furthermore, this case brought to light many of Carlson’s critiques about Fox’s management, one of them being “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” On another occasion, Carlson commented, “We’re playing with fire, for real.” In a third, he criticized “Those ******* are destroying our credibility…A combination of incompetent liberals and top leadership with too much pride to back down is what’s happening.”

As of late, it seems as if Carlson is trying to turn his departure into more publicity. Even though he had the most popular cable news segment in US history, averaging 4.5 million viewers when going live, it seems now Carlson is trying to move his audience to other platforms. His next big move? Migrating to the now unregulated Twitter, where he intends to rebrand himself as a bastion of conservative truth, free from all big media. Still, with Fox News struggling to find Carlson a replacement, and Carlson himself struggling to stay relevant, the future for Carlson and Fox News both remain unclear.