Tucker Carlson has claimed that Fox News is “run by fearful women” as he revealed new details about firing during his interview with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy on his show on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Carlson argued that the people running the business were “incompetent”, but he made sure to say that he had no issues with owner Rupert Murdoch or his son Lachlan, the head of Fox Corp.
He said they were “always nice” and “never got in my way at all”. But he criticised the women at the top of the company without specifically naming names, according to The Daily Beast.
“It’s a company run by fearful women,” he claimed. The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Carlson once called one of the senior executives a “c***”.
Carlson spent 50 minutes talking to Mr Portnoy on his new show Tucker on X which he launched not long after his Fox News dismissal.
Speaking about his firing, he said he wasn’t “exactly sure what I said that was bad”.
He added that he was given a lot of freedom during his 14 years at the network.
“They let me say whatever I want – whatever I wanted, really – for 14 years, and I’ll never stop being grateful for that,” he said. “And I even told them as they were firing me, like, ‘It’s your business.’ But I made a mental note – never work for anyone else again, and I never will. But I can’t be mad about it.”
“No one ever called me,” he claimed, adding that in the end, leaving Fox News was for the best.
“Being humiliated in public, being fired….is totally good for you in the end,” he said. “It keeps you from thinking you’re Jesus.”
Not long after Fox removed Carlson from its primetime lineup, the network also fired his senior producer, Justin Wells.
Wells was mentioned in a lawsuit from a female producer on the show alleging that it was a toxic workplace.
Carlson said the owner of what was then called Twitter, Elon Musk, was quick to contact Mr Wells.
“Within an hour of that happening, Elon called him and said, ‘You should come to Twitter,’” Carlson said. “So I’ll never stop being grateful for that. We don’t work for Elon or anything, but we’re using the site just like everyone else is using it, which is a platform that is not censored.”
In May, as Carlson launched his programme on the platform, Mr Musk said there was no agreement between the parties and that “Tucker is subject to the same rules & rewards of all content creators”.
