Bill O’Reilly, who parted ways with Fox News in 2017, shared his thoughts on the news of Tucker Carlson’s ousting from the network.
O’Reilly was a guest on News Nation at 8PM with former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo. O’Reilly shared that he believes Fox News didn’t necessarily want to remove Carlson, but after the Dominion settlement and now with other litigation pending, Carlson was a liability and they felt they had to part ways in his view.
Cuomo introduced O’Reilly as “the biggest star in the history of Fox News”. O’Reilly was with Fox News for many years and held the 8PM show with massive ratings which have yet to be matched.
O’Reilly explained that during the morning producer meeting, which is held every day. The producers of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” were informed that Carlson “wasn’t coming to work ever again.” O’Reilly speculated with that information, the decision was made Sunday evening to let go of Carlson.
O’Reilly shared that he believes “there are two reasons” for the decision to remove Carlson from the network. “They did not want to move him out,” O’Reilly stated. “But there are lawsuits coming in the wake of Dominion. They lost $800 million plus on Dominion and now you have Smartmatic coming up, and two individual lawsuits. Actually one filed and one may be filed, and that was the key.”
O’Reilly dove into the two personal lawsuits. He shared that a female producer had taped “a bunch of stuff,” and according to O’Reilly, her lawyers went to Fox News and demanded money, or else they would sue. Fox News refused to pay, and a suit was filed. O’Reilly also speculated that the tapes may be released to the public. He added that they were not “good tapes for the Carlson program”.
“Second thing was last night on ’60 minutes’ Ray Epps,” O’Reilly postulated. Epps was the focus of Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” and during the show, Epps stated, “Tucker Carlson ruined my life and my family’s life”. O’Reilly claimed that was a set up for Epps to file a “massive lawsuit against Fox News and Tucker Carlson”.
O’Reilly continued on and shared he believes that there will be even more lawsuits coming from shareholders. “Faced with that, the board of directors said we gotta clean that up. So Dan Bongino was the first domino to fall, even though he wasn’t involved in the Dominion thing… and then Carlson because of the pending litigation was harpooned this morning.”
“That’s the nature of television news, the most wicked industry in the United States of America,” O’Reilly exclaimed.
Cuomo and O’Reilly then moved on to discuss the seemingly coincidental firing of CNN’s Don Lemon.
O’Reilly started, “So there is no Tammy Wynette in television ‘stand by your man’ or woman. If you get to a point where the corporation feels you’re a liability, Don Lemon was a ratings liability. If he had been winning the morning news race he would have never been let go. But if you get to a point where you’re a liability or so the moguls think, you’re gone. It doesn’t matter how loyal you’ve been, how hard you work, how much money. No human being on this planet could have made more money for a company than I did for Fox News. No human being on the planet.”
“They have a four billion dollar war chest, they started from nothing. I was there in the beginning, sixteen years number one, do the math. But here you have the slide in all television ratings, including Fox,” O’Reilly continued. He shared that the eight o’clock hour ratings will collapse on Fox “because Tucker Carlson was driving that train.”
O’Reilly concluded, “They’re gonna get rid of a few more people and then there’s gonna be a layoff.” O’Reilly was not happy to speculate that, as he likes those who work behind the scenes at Fox News, “A lot of them are going to lose their jobs.”
You can see O’Reilly’s appearance with Cuomo below:
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