Tucker Carlson's shock exit from Fox News Tonight has reportedly resulted in a loss of over 700,000 viewers.
On Monday (April 24), the network made a bombshell announcement that it had "agreed to part ways" with its most-watched primetime host with immediate effect.
"We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor," the company said in a short statement. "Mr. Carlson’s last program was Friday, April 21st. Fox News Tonight will air live at 8 PM starting this evening as an interim show helmed by rotating Fox News personalities until a new host is named."
During the final segment on his show, Carlson ate pizza with Tyler Morrell - a pizza delivery driver from Pennsylvania who assisted in the arrest of a suspect evading law enforcement.
The host's final sign-off was upbeat and positive as he told viewers: "What a great way to the end the week," adding: "That's it for us for the week, we'll be back. We'll be back on Monday - in the meantime have the best weekend with the ones you love. See you then," he unknowingly concluded. Well, now it's clear that isn't happening.
Carlson's sudden departure has caused the Fox News Channel to lose hundreds of thousands of viewers - most predominantly in the important 8:00 PM Eastern time slot.
The Washington Times cited a recent report from TV news site TVNewser, where it detailed that an estimated 2,597,000 viewers tuned into replacement program Fox News Tonight, which was hosted by Brian Kilmeade as the first of several rotating hosts, on Monday after Carlson's sudden exit. This beat out competing programs on large networks like CNN and MSNBC in the same time slot - however these ratings are a whopping 20% drop from Tucker Carlson Tonight.
In the past eight weeks, Carlson's program had averaged roughly 3.3 million viewers, per The Hollywood Reporter. This works out to be 700,000 people, which represents an audience decline of 21.3%.
Carlson's shock departure from Fox News came less than a week after the company resolved a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million over the cable company's promotion of lies about the November 2020 election, as reported by Business Insider. Before the lawsuit was settled, text messages and emails by the primetime host and other network personalities were made public as part of court filings.
