Tucker Carlson news – live: Fired Fox News host’s sexist comments about fans revealed as Newsmax ratings climb

Tucker Carlson broke his silence over his exit from Fox News in a defiant and conspiracy-laced video he posted to Twitter on Wednesday evening at 8pm, his former primetime slot on the channel.

And the conspiracy-driven video had more than 1.8 million views in the hour after its release, with more than 5 million people seeing it on their timeline on Elon Musk’s social media app, according to Mediaite.

By 1pm ET on Thursday, the video had been directly watched by 17.3 million users, and seen on the timeline of 57.8 million.

What ended up being Tucker Carlson’s final week on the network relied on familiar themes from a nightly lineup that has grown increasingly more extreme in recent years, tilting at far-right fringe conspiracy theories and anti-trans attacks.

It ended with a plug for his 25-minute special in his line of Tucker Carlson Originals winking at a conspiracy theory that world leaders are forcing people to eat bugs.

Newsmax pulls far below the millions of viewers on its primetime programming that are drawn to Fox News and other major cable networks, but the network has seen a spike in viewers after its rival Fox News fired its far-right star Tucker Carlson on Monday.

That night, at the 8pm slot when Carlson’s programme would typically air, the network drew roughly 530,000 viewers – roughly five times the number of people who watched one week earlier. The next day in the same primetime slot, the network grew to 562,000 viewers.

Fox, meanwhile, has seen dwindling numbers at the 8pm slot that formerly held Tucker Carlson Tonight but now runs the interim Fox News Tonight.

Roughly 2.65 million people watched what would be his final episode last Friday. On Monday, the number dropped to 2.59, then 1.7 on Tuesday, then 1.3 on Wednesday.

Newsmax anchors have delivered fawning coverage of Carlson in recent days, running viewer polls on his firing and even asking at one point, ““Is it right for Fox News to fire Tucker Carlson?”

Evidence in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit showed that Fox leadership feared losing viewers to the small rival network during the 2020 presidential election, when Newsmax was among far-right networks amplified bogus allegations that the election was stolen.

Newsmax is also being sued by Dominion as well as Smartmatic, another elections technology company.

The Independent’s chief Washington correspondent Eric Garcia explains the grip that the most-watched host on the most-watched cable news network had on the GOP:

Hundreds of court filings and anonymously sourced reports from inside Fox News have stitched together a picture of a looming human resources nightmare inside the right-wing media behemoth, with a federal lawsuit from a now-former producer putting Tucker Carlson at the centre of allegations.

Overlapping accounts across multiple news outlets allege that the decision to fire him from the network may have stemmed from Abby Grossberg’s lawsuit, a “crisis” surrounding redacted vulgar messages aimed at other Fox News employees, and Rupert Murdoch’s allegedly growing impatience with the host of the network’s most-watched programme, among other factors.

Was Rupert Murdoch troubled by Tucker Carlson’s embrace of white supremacist conspiracy theories and conservative Christian evangelism? Or was it his comments about Fox leadership? Or the allegations in Abby Grossberg’s lawsuit and litigation threats from Ray Epps? Unnamed sources across several outlets have painted a complicated picture of Carlson’s standing at Fox News that possibly led to his departure from the network.

Abby Grossberg, the former Fox News producer who is suing the network, said Tuesday that Tucker Carlson and his executive producer were responsible making her life a “living hell” when she worked for them.

Ms Grossberg, who was fired by Fox shortly after filing a pair of lawsuits against the network earlier this year, said during an appearance on MSNBC that Carlson’s sudden termination by Fox on Monday left her with mixed emotions.

“There were feelings first of ‘Yes!’ and then also the reality that you don’t want anything bad to happen to anybody,” Ms Grossberg said. “But at the same time, Tucker and his executive producer, Justin Wells, who was also fired, really were responsible for breaking me and making my life a living hell. So there is a feeling of justice, but it’s only partial.”

On his Telegram, white nationalist Nick Fuentes has brushed off the idea that Tucker Carlson was an effective pipeline to his neo-fascist white supremacist ideology.

But the fringe far-right message boards like 4chan that have often served as pipelines to Carlson’s programme are missing a platform for their conspiracy theories and extremism.

“Once a story reached Tucker Carlson, it was at the apex of conservative media, and Fox News is the voice of authority in conservative media,” Robert Faris, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, told NBC News.

“It let other people know that it’s OK to talk about these kinds of things in the language that they use. Just that it’s on the air, it’s ambient and it’s on in so many public spaces means that anything they platform has a wider reach than any of the more committed hyper-partisan sites,” he added.

Meanwhile, other far-right figures like Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec, who amplified the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy that helped launch QAnon, have also lamented Carlson’s departure from Fox News.

“How does Fox stand up against Cancel Culture now after we all just saw them cancel Tucker? Curious,” Posobiec said on Truth Social on Wednesday. He also said this week that Carlson was fired for telling “too much truth”.

The Independent’s Josh Marcus charts the rise and fall of Tucker Carlson Tonight, a primetime juggernaut that endured advertiser boycotts, repeated demands for the host’s resignation, and a view, as The New York Times put it, that his programme “may be the most racist show in the history of cable news,” all while amassing a nightly audience of 3.5 milion viewers.

Hundreds of thousands of Fox News viewers are reacting to Tucker Carlson‘s firing by abandoning the network in his old time slot – at least temporarily.

Fox drew 1.33 million viewers for substitute host Brian Kilmeade in the 8pm on Wednesday night, putting the network second to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in a competition Carlson used to dominate, the Nielsen company said.

That’s down 56 per cent from the 3.05 million viewers Carlson reached last Wednesday, Nielsen said.

More in this report: