Bill O’Reilly Says Fox News Will ‘Diminish’ Without ‘Hard Right’, ‘Contrarian’ Tucker Carlson

Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly weighed in on his replacement Tucker Carlson’s dismissal from the network on Monday, suggesting that the move would result in lower ratings for Fox.

O’Reilly – who lost his prime time Fox News show in April 2017 after it was reported that the network settled several sexual misconduct lawsuits – said on radio station WABC Monday afternoon that Carlson’s firing had taken place almost exactly six years after his own dismissal.

“Tucker Carlson took over from me. For the first three years his ratings were soft. He lost about a million, maybe a little bit more of my audience, and then in 2020 he took a hard right turn,” O’Reilly said. “Carlson basically programmed for a very hard right audience and his numbers came up.”

O’Reilly claimed Tucker had made a “shrewd move” by “going to the far right” in an effort to boost ratings and he argued that Carlson was “never an overtly Republican guy,” and instead merely a “contrarian.”

O’Reilly went on to predict that Fox’s audience would soon “diminish” without Carlson because “the MAGA people” would no longer “hang around.”

A number of prominent supporters of former President Donald Trump criticized Fox News for dismissing Carlson on Monday, accusing the news network of going “woke.” Donald Trump Jr. argued that the move “changes things permanently.”

As for Carlson’s future, O’Reilly suggested that the cable news host may end up following in his footsteps and launching his own news operation.

Listen above via WABC.

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