Tucker Carlson’s new Twitter show landed his lawyers a letter from Fox News asserting he violated his contract, while a network executive is said to have told him the company aims to sideline him through 2024, according to a report.
Axios’s Sara Fischer and Mike Allen were the first to report that Fox News informed Carlson’s lawyers of its claim in a letter on Wednesday, and it opens the door for the network to potentially pursue legal action against the host.
“Carlson was told by a senior Fox executive that the network's goal is to keep him sidelined until 2025.”
Fox News says Tucker Carlson breached his contract https://t.co/f5Te8BfidB
— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) June 7, 2023
Per Axios, the letter cites his contract as stating Carlson is “prohibited from rendering services of any type whatsoever, whether ‘over the internet via streaming or similar distribution, or other digital distribution whether now known or hereafter devised.'”
Speaking with Axios, Bryan Freedman, a lawyer for Carlson, contended the network is working to take away the anchor’s “freedom of speech.”
“Fox defends its very existence on freedom of speech grounds. Now they want to take Tucker Carlson’s right to speak freely away from him because he took to social media to share his thoughts on current events,” Freedman said.
Moreover, a source told the outlet that a senior executive at the network informed Carlson that the Rupert Murdoch-owned company seeks “to keep him sidelined” through 2024 – effectively silencing the foremost conservative media voice during a pivotal presidential election. A well-placed source at the network had previously shared that this was the company’s sentiment while speaking with Breitbart News.
In his 10:27 second video that garnered nearly 90 million impressions in less than 24 hours, Carlson was highly critical of the establishment media’s coverage of the Ukraine-Russia war.
Ep. 1 pic.twitter.com/O7CdPjF830
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 6, 2023
Specifically, he zoned in on reports the Nova Kakhova dam in southern Ukraine, which Reuters notes separates Ukrainian and Russian forces, had been breached.
“So if this was intentional, it was not a military tactic. It was an act of terrorism. The question is who did it? Well, let’s see, the Kokovka dam was effectively Russian, it was built by the Russian government. It currently sits in Russian-controlled territory,” Carlson said, adding that the dam supplies water to Crimea, where the Russian Black Sea Fleet resides.
While both sides of the conflict blamed one another for the dam breach, Carlson called out “the American media, which wasted no time this morning in accusing the Russians of sabotaging their own infrastructure.”
“No one who’s paid to cover these things seemed to entertain even the possibility it could have been Ukrainians who did it … no chance of that,” Carlson noted.
The host’s split with Fox News came in late April when the company announced they had “agreed to part ways.” Subsequent in-depth reporting from Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle indicated the company still had Carlson under contract through next year’s general election.
“As of right now, the plan remains the same: pay out Carlson’s contract and keep him on the sidelines through the 2024 elections,” one source close to Fox News senior executives told Breitbart News at the time. “They knew they would take a beating for this, but everyone — and I mean everyone — is pretty rattled. They weren’t expecting the blowback to be this bad. Hate to say it, but it’s clear that Rupert has lost a step or two.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.