Don’t feel bad for fired Fox host Tucker Carlson, says fellow former Fox superstar Bill O’Reilly, whom Carlson took over for.
“He’ll make a lot of clams,” O’Reilly, who has built a successful independent news operation in the country with his podcast, analysis, and bestselling Killing series of books after getting the boot from Fox in 2017, said.
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Interviewed by WMAL’s Larry O’Connor Wednesday, O’Reilly said “litigation” and pending lawsuits against Carlson are likely the reason Fox fired him on Monday.
“Litigation was the reason,” said O’Reilly. “There are a number of lawsuits pending and then more coming, where Mr. Carlson is going to be involved, particularly the one where he had a spy in his organization and she taped him and his staff and filed a suit in Manhattan. And the lawyer representing her, I understand, is, you know, saying, ‘Well, if you don’t pay us a lot of money, we’re gonna release the tapes,’” he said, referring to a former guest booker who claimed Carlson created a hostile work environment.
O’Reilly said Carlson got stung in what is becoming an “industry” of workplace lawsuits.
“It’s an industry now,” said O’Reilly. “What happens is you’re an employee, you don’t like where you’re working, you set up a taping apparatus to try to get anything, and then you hire a lawyer, and they come in and claim whatever they want to claim. So this is happening every hour on the hour all across the United States. There are lawyers lined up to do this. Most of these cases are settled and nobody even knows about them. But this one is very high profile,” he told O’Connor, host of O’Connor and Company.
He predicted the former booker, Abby Grossberg, could receive “between $10 and $15 million.”
He said Carlson is likely to create his own independent operation and said Joe Rogan would be a good model.
“Carlson is a talented broadcaster. He’s got a big following. He’ll go into the independent news or analysis industry, of which I started six years ago. Ironically, it was to the week six years ago that I left Fox News. And he’ll make a bloody fortune. Because he’s interesting to listen to,” he told O’Connor.
“They did him a favor. I mean, my life is so much better now than it was six years ago when I had to deal with all this stuff. They did him a favor. He’s gonna make a lot of money,” O’Reilly said.
He added, “Look, billoreilly.com is the most successful independent news agency in the world. Now, you’ll never see that written in the Washington Post or anything like that because they despise me. But we built this from nothing into this colossus, this worldwide news organization. And I’ve never, you know, I would have people ask, ‘Would you go back?’ No, no. I don’t want to work for anybody anymore. I don’t want to put up with all the corporate BS, which is like up to your eyebrows.”
Asked to compare Carlson’s firing with that of Don Lemon from CNN This Morning, O’Reilly said CNN moved because he considers Lemon boring and the morning show he was on had poor ratings.
“It’s just low ratings. That’s it. Yeah, I mean, that show on CNN has the lowest-rated morning show in history,” O’Reilly said, adding, “If you want to really be fair, and I do, more people eat at [Georgetown’s] Cafe Milano in a week than watch the CNN morning show,” O’Reilly added.
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