A trip that pundit Tucker Carlson took to Hungary to interview Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2021 was not authorized by Fox News, the network that later fired him, according to a new book.
In a forthcoming book about the inner workings of the network in recent months, excerpts from which he shared with the Daily Beast, journalist Brian Stelter writes that Carlson “whipped his show up into an infomercial for Viktor Orbán’s increasingly autocratic, patriarchal nation,” without permission from Fox to do so.
The pundit was planning a second trip to the European nation the following year, Stelter reported, but Fox News top brass reined him in.
Fox pulled Carlson off the air in April, days after it agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems hundreds of millions of dollars to settle claims of defamation regarding President Biden’s 2020 victory. He remains under contract with the network and has since launched a new project on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Carlson recently took another trip to Hungary for a segment on his X show.
In a separate excerpt, Stelter reports on the circumstances surrounding Jeanine Pirro’s move from hosting a weekend prime-time show to a gig as a regular panelist on “The Five,” the top-rated program on cable news.
Pirro has been a major booster of former President Trump on Fox’s airwaves for years and was named in Dominion’s lawsuit along with a number of other Fox News hosts as it made its case in court that the network knowingly spread falsehoods about its software following the 2020 election.
“Pirro’s stubborn, slavish Trumpiness clashed with Fox execs who’d grown tired of her histrionic shenanigans,” Stelter wrote, noting a producer at Fox had called her “a reckless maniac,” in an e-mail revealed as part of the network’s litigation with Dominion.
Pirro is one of several pro-Trump commentators who has for years been featured prominently at Fox, which the former president has turned sour on in recent months over its coverage of his political rivals as he mounts another bid for the White House.
Stelter also reports that it was Lachlan Murdoch, the oldest son of mogul Rupert Murdoch and incoming chair of Fox and News Corp., who made the decision to pull Carlson off the air, with the elder Murdoch at one point quipping that the host “had gotten too big for his boots” shortly before he was shown the door.
Updated: 11:18 a.m.