If there’s anyone that can empathize with the Tucker Carlson situation, it’s Bill O’Reilly.
O’Reilly, like Carlson, was the top-rated host on Fox News before being pushed out by network executives. In O’Reilly’s case, he was accused of sexual harassment by several women inside the organization. Reporting surrounding Carlson’s exit reveals a hostile and sexualized workplace environment as one of the leading causes of his departure.
Carlson stepped into the timeslot previously hosted by O’Reilly in 2016. O’Reilly told 77 WABC’s Cats & Cosby that Carlson took a hard right to grow his audience.
“Tucker Carlson took over from me. For the first three years his ratings were soft,” said O’Reilly. “He lost about a million, maybe a little bit more of my audience, and then in 2020 he took a hard right turn. He decided to program for very committed conservative people. I wanted a big tent…Carlson basically programmed for a very hard-right audience and his numbers came up and he was the second-highest-rated show next to The Five. But in the past four or five months, his show and every other show on Fox has lost its younger audience. Those 25 to 54 have fled for some reason. I don’t think it’s because of the lawsuit, but I could be wrong on that.”
O’Reilly gave Carlson credit for coming to the decision to move to the “far right” in an effort to boost his ratings.
He then said his former network is going to continue to slip.
“Fox News, in my opinion, is going to diminish now. It’s already skidding in the ratings, and it has been for a few months. But now that’s gonna accelerate. The Murdochs don’t want Donald Trump to be president again…so the MAGA people, which represents a large percentage of the Fox audience, they’re not gonna hang around there.”
