Bill O'Reilly Says There Are 3 Factors That Led to Tucker Carlson's Ouster: 'This Is Bad for Fox News'
Bill O’Reilly knows a thing or two about getting fired from Fox News.
The former Fox superstar, who was let go in 2017, spent a good deal of Monday weighing in on the ouster of Tucker Carlson from the network’s prime-time slot.
And what he had to say shouldn’t be making Fox executives too comfortable with the decision to “part ways” with the man who took his place.
In an interview on NewsNation, with former CNN superstar Chris Cuomo, O’Reilly said he had learned that the Fox decision was a result of several legal factors — including the network’s settlement announced last week between the network and Dominion Voting Systems to settle a defamation case that had named Carlson and other Fox personalities, as well as pending or potential lawsuits naming Carlson in particular.
Also, O’Reilly said, Fox News Corp. was looking at a potential lawsuit by Ray Epps, a man who was profiled on CBS on Sunday by “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker and had been repeatedly cited on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” as a potential federal agent who helped incite the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion.
(For American conservatives aware of the obvious bias “60 Minutes” shows against Republicans — whether Donald Trump, when he was in the White House, or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — sympathetic treatment from the program isn’t exactly a character reference.)
Regardless, O’Reilly said, “this is bad for Fox News. There’s nothing good about this.”
Check out the interview here:
O’Reilly’s experiences make him probably the only person in the world to have gone through anything similar to what Carlson is facing now.
The Carlson-Fox split came almost six years to the day after Fox News announced that O’Reilly, long the cable network’s ratings king, would no longer be part of its programming.
That announcement came after a series of lawsuits accusing O’Reilly of “sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior,” Fox media analyst Howard Kurtz wrote at the time.
As it turned out, of course, Carlson became the new ratings king at Fox prime time, competing with the daytime show “The Five” as the network’s top ratings draw and dwarfing competition from other networks.
In another interview Monday, on New York’s WABC, O’Reilly attributed Carlson’s ratings success to what he called Carlson’s “hard-right turn” in 2020.
Carson “decided to program for very committed, conservative people … program for a very hard-right audience,” O’Reilly said.
Well, no one who watched Carlson regularly would doubt that. His nightly monologues routinely blasted away fictions spread by the Democratic Party and its supporters in the establishment media.
That’s why the show was a ratings success — Carlson’s voice was one of the few places Americans, tired of being spoonfed leftists propaganda, could turn.
And on his own independent show, “No Spin News,” O’Reilly walked through the reasons for the Fox decision and its impact on Carlson. (O’Reilly was confident Carlson would “walk away with a nice piece of change.)
But he also highlighted the impact on the presidential race next year.
“This will have a tremendous effect on the future of the Fox News Channel, no doubt about that,” O’Reilly said. “But more importantly, on Republican politics in the 2024 presidential election.”
Bill O’Reilly a former Fox news anchor who was replaced by Tucker Carlson confirms Tucker and his team were preparing for the Monday night show, so news of his sacking was ‘sudden’.
Bill also highlights the fact that Fox news is preparing for more law suits, perhaps including… pic.twitter.com/Ic14bxudsr
— Subdivisions (@Douglasmaher) April 25, 2023
“Because the Republican Party, most of it, paid attention to Tucker Carlson.”
The fact that Fox has let Carlson go — in a decision that was made on Sunday, according to O’Reilly — isn’t going to endear the network to millions of American conservatives who view it (or viewed it) as an island of sanity in an ocean of leftist lunacy.
Whatever the reasons for it — an unpublicized stipulation of the Dominion settlement, fear of looming or filed lawsuits, or some other reason that isn’t yet publicly known — one thing at this point is clear, and O’Reilly put it succinctly:
“This is bad for Fox News. There is nothing good about this.”
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