©AP/Brynn Anderson
Fox News has alleged that former host Tucker Carlson breached his employment contract by launching a new talk show on Twitter, arguing that the network has exclusive rights to his services.
Fox News general counsel Bernard Gugar sent a letter on Tuesday evening to Carlson’s lawyers, warning that the network would take action to protect its contractual rights, Axios reported on Wednesday. “This evening, we were made aware of Mr. Tucker Carlson’s appearance on Twitter in a video that lasted over 10 minutes,” the outlet quoted Gugar as saying. “Pursuant to the terms of the agreement, Mr. Carlson’s services shall be completely exclusive to Fox.”
Carlson, who boasted the highest ratings in US cable news history, was ousted by Fox in April, after the network agreed to pay a $787 million defamation settlement to Dominion Voting Systems for allegedly making false statements about the company. Axios said Fox, which continues to pay Carlson his contractually agreed salary, aims to keep him silenced through 2025, which would keep him sidelined through the 2024 presidential election.
The host’s own Twitter talk show debuted on Tuesday, attracting more than 90 million views in its first 24 hours. The ratings highwater mark for his primetime show at Fox was 5.3 million viewers.
Gugar’s letter claimed that under Carlson’s contract, the host was “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.”
Bryan Freedman, a lawyer representing Carlson, blasted Fox’s effort to block Carlson from expressing his views. “Fox defends its very existence on freedom of speech grounds,” he said in a statement. “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.”
Carlson has accused Fox of fraud and claimed that network executives reneged on their promises, including a pledge not to settle with Dominion “in a way which would indicate wrongdoing.” Axios said a Fox board member told the host that he was taken off the air as part of the legal settlement.
Tucker Carlson steamrolls Ukraine propaganda in new show
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has released the first episode of his new series on Twitter, taking Western news agencies to task for one-sided reporting on the conflict in Ukraine and open hostility toward anybody voicing dissenting views.
Dubbed ‘Tucker on Twitter’, the show’s first ten-minute segment was shared on the social media platform on Tuesday night. The clip opened with a monologue on the alleged Ukrainian attack on a major dam in Russia’s Kherson Region this week, which Carlson dubbed “an act of terrorism.”
“Blowing up the dam may be bad for Ukraine, but it hurts Russia more, and for precisely that reason the Ukrainian government has considered destroying it,” he said. Carlson went on to observe that a Ukrainian general had admitted to planning attacks on the Kakhovka dam facility in comments to the Washington Post last December.
Ep. 1 pic.twitter.com/O7CdPjF830
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 6, 2023
While Carlson said he had little doubt that Kiev was behind the incident, he noted that several American media outlets had already suggested that Moscow may have arranged the attack, claiming they view Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky as simply “too decent for terrorism.”
“Of all the people in the world, our shifty, dead-eyed Ukrainian friend in the tracksuit is uniquely incapable of blowing up a dam. He’s literally a living saint, a man in whom there is no sin,” he went on, describing the general attitude within the mainstream press.
The pundit drew comparisons to last year’s attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, which were built to carry natural gas from Russia into Germany. Though Carlson argued it was “obvious” that Ukraine had carried out the sabotage, he said US media outlets had little interest in investigating, helping to make Americans among “the least informed people in the world.”
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