Tucker Carlson was ousted from Fox News on Monday.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The TV industry has been rocked by exits in the past 24 hours.
NBCU CEO Jeff Shell, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, and CNN’s Don Lemon are all out.
Disney also started its second round of job cuts on Monday.
It’s judgment day in TV land.
In the past 24 hours, shockwave after shockwave has rocked the media ecosystem, and the news business in particular.
OUT: NBCU CEO Jeff Shell, who said Sunday afternoon he was exiting the company after an “inappropriate relationship with a woman in the company.” CNBC anchor Hadley Gamble had made a sexual harassment and sex discrimination complaint against him to the company, her lawyer told The Wall Street Journal on Monday.OUT: Tucker Carlson, who Fox News said it had “agreed to part ways” with on Monday morning.OUT: CNN’s Don Lemon, who wrote on Twitter Monday afternoon that he was “stunned” at his termination and had found out through his agent.
Though each exit has its own reasons, they will certainly not be the last shake-ups at three media companies going through seismic changes.
Shell’s bombshell exit took many insiders totally by surprise, Insider’s Claire Atkinson reported on Sunday.
“People are shocked,” one NBCU exec told her.
Comcast named President Michael Cavanagh to step in temporarily for Shell. But that did not stop tongues wagging about who could replace Shell permanently, or how NBCU could change. Two notable threads of thought have centered around whether Shell’s exit might give Comcast the chance to rethink its strategy with streamer Peacock, which has been the butt of many a joke in Hollywood, and whether the CEO’s exit makes it more likely that NBCU could eventually combine with Warner Bros. Discovery (once it’s legally allowed).
The rumor mill hardly had time to get rolling when the biggest news of the 24-hour period dropped: Tucker Carlson was out at Fox News.
Carlson’s exit from Fox News comes less than a week after Fox settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million over the company’s promotion of election lies.
Prior to the settlement, embarrassing texts from Carlson came to light in which he said he “passionately” hated President Trump, among other comments that clashed with his on-air persona. In those texts, Carlson also sometimes took aim at Fox management, which The Washington Post reported Monday played a role in his ouster (citing “a person familiar with the company’s thinking”).
The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that the decision to fire Carlson came from Rupert Murdoch, citing “people familiar with the situation who were not authorized to comment publicly.” The outlet also reported that those people said the discrimination lawsuit filed by fired producer Abby Grossberg played a role in Carlson’s exit.
Many had predicted that the Dominion suit might lead Fox boss Murdoch to offer some sort of “blood sacrifice,” as Puck’s Dylan Byers put it — as he had with Rebekah Brooks after the phone-hacking scandal. But the stature of Carlson makes a clear argument that it’s not business as usual at Fox News. If Carlson could be so quickly jettisoned, what other changes might happen at the network?
Fox News declined to comment beyond its press release saying it had agreed to “part ways” with Carlson. NBCU did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Media commenters had hardly even begun composing their tweets about the Carlson news when Don Lemon posted a screenshot on Twitter saying he’d been informed by his agent that he’d been terminated.
“I would have thought that someone in management would have the decency to tell me directly,” he wrote. The network disputed that characterization and said he had been “offered an opportunity to meet with management.”
Media watchers had been primed for a potential Lemon exit for weeks. The embattled host had been pulled off “CNN This Morning” for two days in February after saying Nikki Haley wasn’t a viable presidential candidate because she wasn’t “in her prime.” That was followed by a Variety report earlier this month that alleged Lemon had a history of misogynistic behavior toward coworkers.
Lemon’s ouster comes as CNN CEO Chris Licht has sought to position the network as less partisan and remake its coverage in a post-Jeff-Zucker world. Change has been the order of the day at CNN in recent months. But the dumping of Carlson and Lemon still shows how willing cable networks are in this moment to get rid of stars they may believe pose a risk to the larger organization.
With all the news of the past 24 hours, media insiders have hardly even gotten a chance to drill down into the second wave of layoffs at Disney, which will number in the thousands.
If any media companies have bad news to share, today is probably a good time.