Top Fox Hosts Are Telling Friends They Could Be the Next to Go
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Top on-air presenters are openly worrying about getting fired. Management is on the prowl for leakers. And the leakers themselves are dodging “snitches” by putting fake names in their phone to hide incoming calls from reporters.
Fox News’ first week of life after Tucker Carlson got fired was a strange one indeed.
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Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, two longtime hosts and Donald Trump allies, have told friends they’re concerned they could be sacked next, according to two sources familiar with the situation.
According to people with knowledge of the matter, executives have recently held high-level discussions about Fox Business host Bartiromo’s future at the company. In recent years, the host became a mouthpiece for Trump, propping up conspiracy theories and peddling lies about the 2020 election. Those falsehoods found their way into a Dominion Voting Systems filing in the company’s mega-lawsuit against Fox. The filing pointed to Bartiromo’s Nov. 8 interview with Trump-aligned attorney, Sidney Powell, to discuss “voting irregularities” — on-air programming that contrasted sharply with the host’s Dominion deposition statements, in which Bartiromo said the email underpinning Powell’s claims was “nonsense.”
Fox paid $787.5 million earlier this month to settle the Dominion lawsuit.
Pirro, an ardent Trump supporter whose claims about election fraud were highlighted by Dominion in its legal filings, has also been telling confidants she’s worried she’ll be shown the door, according to one of the people familiar with the situation.
It’s not just hosts who are anxious. Other sources at and close to the network say that, in the wake of Carlson’s ouster, some Fox brass have grilled certain staff about whether they or their teams had recently blabbed to the press about Carlson’s abrupt dismissal.
The grilling has not stopped a steady stream of Carlson-related leaks, and Fox staff are taking steps to avoid getting caught communicating without outside sources. Several staffers have taken additional measures to shield their communications with outside media, changing journalist contacts to fake names in case they receive a call in the presence of management or “their spies,” as one Fox employee describes. (By “spies,” the employee was referring to personnel suspected of “snitch[ing]” to upper management about their colleagues’ alleged infractions in order to climb the ladder.)
While the tension inside the building rises, the network’s ratings — Fox News’ perpetual rebuttal to criticism — have declined sharply. On Wednesday, when guest host Brian Kilmeade slid into Carlson’s former chair, he drew 1.33 million viewers, down 56 percent from Tucker’s draw a week earlier, according to the Associated Press. Kilmeade’s numbers also put the network in an unfamiliar position: Second, behind liberal-leaning MSNBC.
To his audience Carlson was a herald of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, and the former president, according to two sources familiar with the matter, called Carlson early this week to lend his personal support to the ousted host. (Privately, Carlson once referred to the former president as a “demonic force,” but that appears to be water under the bridge.)
Other high-profile members of the Republican Party and conservative media lashed out at Fox, including the far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. “Everyone I’ve talked to has deleted the Fox News app on their phones,” said the Georgia Republican, who frequently lies.
While some on the Christian right saw Satan’s hand in Carlson’s firing, details on the more plausible causes of his dismissal have trickled out in the media.
In the days since, the reported explanations for the sudden termination have included issues connected to the settled, wildly expensive Dominion-Fox lawsuit, the Abby Grossberg allegations, and an alleged plethora of so-far unpublished and “highly offensive” remarks Carlson made about network senior staff that triggered a “crisis” among the board of directors, according to The New York Times. Moreover, The Wall Street Journal reported that Fox News attorneys had discovered “the time he called a senior Fox News executive the c-word.” (As Rolling Stone reported Tuesday, prominent executives at Fox have kept a dossier of alleged dirt and internal complaints about Carlson — and stand ready to leak potentially embarrassing contents of it if they believe their former employee steps too out of line.)
Whatever the cause of the ouster, the news of it broke suddenly. On Monday morning, the minutes in between Carlson being informed he was out and Fox’s public announcement of his firing were so few that some of his close family members found out about it from the news, not from him, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
But for now, it’s unclear where Fox’s onetime superstar will head next. Carlson was booted from the channel with a committed following that, to some extent or another, appears ready to go where he leads them. The coveted 8 p.m. time slot at Fox News helped grant Carlson not just to a level of media prominence, but one of actual political and policy influence in the GOP elite. His preferences could help Republican primary campaigns get over the finish line. During and following the Trump presidency, Carlson has had the ear of the leader of the Republican Party. And for years of Tucker Carlson Tonight’s run, powerful conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill “lived in fear” — as numerous Fox sources, political operatives, and GOP members of Congress have phrased it — that the host would come after them during his evening broadcast. At times, these politicians would bend over backwards simply to appease Carlson’s whims and grievances.
It is not at all clear how much of that influence will remain once deprived of Fox’s most prized perch. After the news of his firing broke on Monday, Carlson almost instantly started receiving interest and offers from other media organizations and Fox competitors, including Newsmax TV, according to three sources with knowledge of the outreach. This even included a friendly text message from MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a leading bankroller of the MAGA election denial movement and a close friend of Trump’s.
“I am wanting to hire him [for Lindell TV or my social app Frank Speech],” the pillow mogul tells Rolling Stone. “I have texted him [about it]…No, I have not heard back.”
Carlson reportedly made up to $20 million a year while at Fox. Lindell says he doesn’t know how much he’s willing to pay to snatch Tucker off the market.
Diana Falzone, one of the authors of this article, worked at Fox News from 2012 to 2018.
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