“The View” panel cooked Tucker Carlson over how his career has panned out in the months since his Fox News firing in April.
“Kind of like Bill O’Reilly, there’s always this question of ‘They don’t need Fox News, they’ll be just as powerful after.’ No, no, no, you need the institution, you are all replaceable,” said co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, who compared Carlson to another ex-Fox News figure.
“They end up in somebody’s basement with a podcast,” added Joy Behar in a dig at O’Reilly and his “No Spin News” podcast, which he launched following his 2017 departure at Fox due to a sexual harassment scandal.
“The View” took aim at Carlson, who has since brought his show to X (Twitter) after abruptly leaving his primetime Fox News slot, as they discussed a Vanity Fair-published excerpt of Brian Stelter’s upcoming book “Network of Lies,” which looks at the firing.
Co-host Sunny Hostin noted that Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit, adding that it’s also facing an unresolved $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed by voting technology company Smartmatic.
“He cost them too much money and in order to stop the bleeding when you have a pending lawsuit for over a billion dollars against you, you can use somewhat of a defense — ‘Listen, we recognize what he was doing and he no longer works for the company.’ Provides ’em a little bit of money cover, not a lot,” she said.
Carlson has claimed that he “knows” his exit from Fox News was a “condition of the Dominion settlement” although both Dominion and the network have denied such a claim.
Griffin, later in the segment, declared that Carlson has the “distinct privilege” of being the only host” canned by MSNBC, CNN and Fox News before referring to danger in “fame and power.”
“I’ve seen it happen to too many people. I’ve known him for a decade, Tucker, and he used to want to be the future George Will. He wanted to elevate the discourse. He wanted the Republican Party to be the party of ideas,” said Griffin of Carlson.
“Now he’s on Twitter hosting a deranged conspiracy theorist who claims he’s Obama’s gay lover that he did crack with. How the mighty have fallen.”