Tucker Carlson was one of Donald Trump’s biggest on-air supporters.
Many suspect that is why Fox News fired him.
Now Donald Trump dropped the hammer on Fox News over canceling Tucker Carlson.
As Black Eye Politics reports:
It was only a matter of time until Donald Trump weighed in on Fox News firing Tucker Carlson.
The response was typical Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump issued Fox News this major warning about firing Tucker Carlson.
Trump offered his most in-depth thoughts on Carlson’s firing in an appearance on his son Donald Trump Jr.’s Triggered podcast.
The 45th president ripped Fox News for firing Carlson, their most popular host, for telling the truth about Joe Biden’s disastrous war in Ukraine, immigration, the transgender agenda, and weaponizing the government to attack Trump and voters.
“I think it’s a shame what happened to Tucker. He had the number one show — he was doing great, his show’s very interesting and he was out there in the sense that he was telling the truth. To me the other ones are out there because they’re lying and they’re hiding and they’re afraid to talk,” Trump stated.
There was much speculation in the press that Fox News canceled Carlson to make him the scapegoat for the network’s record $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over false claims made by other hosts and guests that the company’s machines switched votes in the last election.
Carlson was a minor part of that suit and Trump criticized Fox News for rolling over and settling rather than defending their First Amendment right to report on newsworthy statements made by the president’s lawyers.
“I don’t know how they could have lost the case if they had lawyers that would’ve talked about free speech and have had lawyers that would’ve talked about platforms. It’s a news platform that means every time somebody goes on the news, if they say something and if it’s wrong, CBS or NBC Fake News or ABC Fake News, any of them — any of these, groups or outlets or platforms are gonna be responsible for whatever is said. It’s ridiculous. You won’t have any news — they ought to close up their news shows right now. So I think losing Tucker, having Tucker not be there, is gonna have a big impact and a very negative impact on Fox,” Trump added.
Many legal experts thought Fox News was likely to lose at trial because of a number of rulings by the judge that hamstrung the network’s ability to defend itself but that these rulings also provided Fox a strong case to have whatever damages a jury awarded thrown out on appeal.
News organizations have a right to report on important news stories.
The judge in this case banned Fox News from making that defense.
Any appeals court likely would have tossed a finding against Fox News that it committed defamation by airing allegations made by Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani on the basis that the trial judge ignored standard defamation case law that provides news organizations wide latitude to cover the news as long as they don’t knowingly publish falsehoods.
But Fox News likely did not want to find itself tied up in a years-long appeal process and suffer the negative headlines so it settled.
And Donald Trump was not a fan of Fox News throwing Tucker Carlson overboard as a sacrifice to show shareholders and the board of directors that it would clear up its act.