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Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Fox News Channel is considering “multiple scenarios” for its primetime lineup after the ouster of Tucker Carlson, with the network declining to comment on a recent report that veteran Sean Hannity might move into its 8 p.m. lead-off hour. “No decision has been made on a new primetime line-up and there are multiple scenarios under consideration,” Fox News said in a statement Wednesday. Fox News issued the comment in the wake of The Drudge Report posting the notion that Hannity would move to 8, while Jesse Watters, who has fared well at 7 p.m., would move into the primetime schedule, along with Greg Gutfeld, who hosts a late-night-styled 11 p.m. program. Such a move would have significant ramifications that would not dovetail with recent Fox News strategy. Gutfeld’s 11 p.m. program has been a break-out success with the network’s viewers, and part of a move that has extended the outlet’s opinion block from 7 p.m. to midnight. Watters’ show at 7 has also been considered successful, and he might seem like a natural successor to Carlson. Watters is also more right-leaning than others on the roster and he got his start making appearances at 8 p.m. on Bill O’Reilly’s show. But people familiar with Fox News say executives have suggested that Watters was doing well in the 7 p.m. hour he began anchoring in 2022 and may not be Carlson’s successor.

CNN’s town hall with Donald Trump beat the cable news competition, as expected, with an average of 3.12 million viewers, according to early Nielsen numbers.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Kaitlan Collins spent Wednesday night going toe to toe on live TV with a former President who refused to acknowledge her fact-checking of his many conspiracy theories and untruths. And that just may be a warm up. Collins, the CNN up-and-comer who has gone from White House correspondent to morning anchor all before turning 35, is widely expected to be given new anchoring duties at 9 p.m., according to two people familiar with the matter. The hour is one of the most competitive on the cable-news schedule and has served as a home to some of the most popular hosts in the format, including Rachel Maddow, Sean Hannity and Chris Cuomo. CNN declined to make executives available for comment. Puck previously reported the looming deal, which could be unveiled in days to come — barring unforeseen changes, or a pivot in the strategic thinking of CNN CEO Chris Licht, one of these people cautioned.

nor is being floated as Carlson’s heir apparent. That Fox News is still competitive in that time-slot with a drop-in replacement speaks to its enduring ratings strength.

settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which sued the network for allegedly airing false claims about the 2020 election.Fox News ultimately agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million to resolve the lawsuit, without having to issue an apology for the statements in question.As part of discovery, Dominion sought out internal communications at Fox News, some of which were made public. According to The Washington Post, those communications included text messages from Carlson.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Sean Hannity was blindsided by Fox News’ announcement that Tucker Carlson is parting ways with the network. Carlson was Fox News’ most-watched primetime host with his 8 p.m. ET news hour “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” which Hannity then followed in the 9 p.m. hour with his own eponymous series. Carlson’s show launched in November 2016, while “Hannity” has been a Fox News flagship series since 2009. “It’s very hard,” Hannity said at the start of his radio show, “The Sean Hannity Show,” regarding Carlson’s Fox News departure (via The Wrap). “My phone has been blowing up all day. The hard part for me is I don’t have a clue… I have no idea. Was it Tucker’s decision? Was it Fox’s? Was it a mutual agreement that they had? I don’t know.”

As the news that both Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon were out at their respective networks hit the front pages this morning, a slew of boldfaced names began to react, chiefly to Carlson’s departure.

Lever News, which first reported the write-off potential and set the deduction at $213 million, noted that the IRS has ruled multiple times that settlements payments can be deducted.The settlement reached Tuesday will result the largest-known defamation payout in U.S. history, after Fox agreed to the deal at the last minute.

reached a settlement in their $1.6 billion defamation battle on Tuesday, “The Daily Show” guest host Jordan Klepper had some guesses as to what the network will be doing to make sure their debt is paid off — including “[putting] down Sean Hannity.”Dominion settled the suit against Fox News for $787.5 million, almost exactly half of what they were suing for. In the end, Fox didn’t apologize for the claims, and didn’t actually admit to knowingly lying to their viewers, but said, “We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.” On Tuesday night, Klepper lamented that the case didn’t go to trial, joking that he was really looking forward to seeing the testimonies given by Fox News hosts.

via Acyn on Twitter), found that particular claim risible, to put it mildly.“As for the second part of that statement, that this settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards,” Cooper said on Tuesday’s episode of his CNN show. “As Mike Wallace used to say when interviewing someone shoveling crap, ‘Come on.'”Cooper continued, “If there is anything we learned from the depositions, texts, and emails that were released by Dominion in the lead up to this case, is that there was no commitment to even basic journalistic standards where the 2020 election was concerned.”“Fox anchors said one thing on air to the audience – they feared might abandon them.

Fox News has settled Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the Rupert Murdoch-owned organization, averting a lengthy, expensive and certain to be embarrassing trial.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Fox Corporation and Dominion Voting Systems agreed to settle a much-discussed $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit mere hours after a jury had been seated to consider the matter in Delaware’s Superior Court. Attorneys for the two sides had been set to deliver opening statements to the jury. But that activity was delayed Tuesday after Judge Eric M. Davis called for a lunch break. “The parties have resolved their case,” the judge said. The legal case had already generated intense scrutiny, with documents, emails and texts from senior Fox executives and well-known Fox News anchors and hosts all suggesting many people at the company knew they were disseminating conspiracy theories around the 2020 presidential election and Dominion Voting’s role in it.

First Amendment implications.Fox is accused of defaming Dominion’s immediately following the 2020 presidential election, when some of the network’s guests and hosts suggested that the Denver company’s voting machines had been hacked or compromised. The network has stridently denied any wrongdoing, saying it was merely reporting what was being said by newsmakers – including Donald Trump and his shrinking circle of lawyers, including Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani – who were pushing the unfounded claims.Dominion scored a series of early victories in discovery and pre-trial filings, from embarrassing revelations about behind-the-scenes discord at the network’s promotion of zany election conspiracy theorists down to the sloppy “discovery misconduct” of Fox’s lawyers on the eve of trial.

After a one-day delay and amidst whispers of settlement talks, Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation trial against Fox News is set to begin Tuesday in Wilmington, DE.

Popular hip-hop media personality DJ Akademiks has signed an exclusive streaming deal with Rumble, a site that brands itself as “immune to cancel culture”; hosts right-wing figures such as Dinesh D’Souza, Dan Bongino, and Sean Hannity, as well as the Donald Trump-owned platform Truth Social; and is funded in part by tech billionaire Peter Thiel and Republican Ohio senator J.D. Vance.

Sean Hannity and Ainsley Earhardt are true.The long-running romance was confirmed in photos obtained by on Tuesday, showing the TV personalities sitting together arm-in-arm at a restaurant and traveling together with Earhardt's 7-year-old daughter in Palm Beach, Florida.Fox New is not commenting on the reports of their relationship.Hannity, 61, and Earhardt, 49 -- two of the network's most prominent and popular hosts — first sparked romance rumors three years ago, but have largely remained tight-lipped about their connection and reserved when it comes to being seen together in public before now.Earhardt shares her daughter, Hayden, with her ex-husband, former Clemson Tigers quarterback Will Proctor. The pair married in October 2012, and Earhardt filed for divorce in October 2018.She and Hannity were first romantically linked in August 2019.Hannity was previously married to Jill Rhodes for over two decades.

Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” with Colin Jost and Michael Che took multiple swings at Fox News and Donald Trump on the show.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch could be called upon to testify in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit suit against Fox News and Fox Corp., per a Delaware judge who says he is not against calling upon the media moguls. If the attorneys for Dominion issue trial subpoenas to force a testimony from the Fox leaders, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis said at a public hearing Wednesday he, “would not quash it and I would compel them to come,” per NBC News. “It would be my discretion that they come,” Davis said. Dominion’s attorneys requested in a letter to the court Wednesday that live testimony be required from Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, as well as Fox board member and former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Fox exec Viet Dinh. Davis approved the request to compel each of them to testify, according to NBC News.

 Unless Rupert Murdoch and Fox News settle soon, Dominion Voting Systems will have its day in court in its defamation case against the combative conservative cable newser.

Twice-impeached former president Donald Trump apparently thinks that the U.S. government should be a caste system, rather than a democracy — but that doesn’t mean he can explain how a caste system works. In fact, he tried on Wednesday night and got a thorough roasting for it on Wednesday from Seth Meyers.On Tuesday night, the second portion of Trump’s interview with Sean Hannity aired on Fox News, marking the first time Trump has appeared on the network in several months amid several investigations into him.

On Tuesday’s “The Late Show,” host Stephen Colbert unsurprisingly took a moment to lay into Donald Trump’s Monday night Fox News interview with Sean Hannity, playing clips of the former president’s “rambling” answers and his refusal to play along with some of Hannity’s soft-ball questions. When it came to answering to the photo he posted to Truth Social depicting himself holding a baseball bat over Manhattan DA Alvin Brigg’s head, Trump’s response didn’t satisfy Colbert.

Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham have made Fox News’ witness list for its defamation trial against Dominion Voting Systems. On Tuesday, a legal filing submitted by the network revealed a slew of people for it submitted as potential witnesses in the $1.6 billion lawsuit against the network. Among them were several Fox News other personalities including Bret Baier, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs. Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and Fox News president Jay Wallace also made the list.

Dominion Voting Systems’ upcoming defamation trial against Fox News and Fox Corp., scheduled to begin on April 17, may very well feature a parade of the network’s news personalities taking the stand, with both sides in the case planning to call figures including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Bret Baier.

Sen. Lindsey Graham urged the audience of “The Daily Show” to boo him during an interview with guest host and former Minnesota senator Al Franken Monday night.The moment came after Franken had asked the South Carolina Republican why Donald Trump would say such a “stupid thing” after the former president told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he could’ve stopped Russia’s invasion of Ukraine if he had the opportunity to negotiate with Putin – and “at worst, I could’ve made a deal to take over something.”Graham dismissed the question before arguing that Trump “did a pretty good job of taking the fight to the terrorists” when he was president.“He killed Soleimani, he killed Baghdadi,” Graham said.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Fox News Media, known best for shows led by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, is placing new emphasis on programming that relies more heavily on Kevin Costner, weather emergencies and Greg Gutfeld. In a meeting with advertisers slated to be held Tuesday, executives at the Fox Corp.-backed operation, will spotlight a growing array of lifestyle content, while continuing to nod to the political programming that draws some of its networks’ biggest audiences. Among the Fox News Media executives scheduled to be on hand were Suzanne Scott, the CEO, and Jay Wallace, president and executive editor. “If you take a look at our overall audience across all of Fox News Media, 40% comes from lifestyle – sports, weather, entertainment offerings,” says Jeff Collins, executive vice president of advertsing sales for Fox News Media. “We just want to reiterate to our clients the depth and breadth of this type of content that we have outside of just hard news.”

It looked like a good week for Fox News on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver today as the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and uncertainty in the financial world replaced the searing revelations resulting from Dominion Voting’s lawsuit against the Rupert Murdoch-owned cable newser on the HBO series.

Fox News Channel viewers are less trusting of the cable network in the wake of publicly disclosed text messages and emails from Fox executives and on-air personalities, according to a new survey.  But only 9% of Fox News viewers say they aren’t watching the network as much as they used to, per research provided exclusively to Variety Intelligence Platform by consumer insights specialists Maru Group. (Click to an expanded subscriber version for full results.) A representative for Fox News told VIP+, “There has been no impact to advertising, with no advertisers dropping or pausing.” 

Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch for creating “monsters” like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, then trying to disavow their words.Those words, of course, came in the form of emails and text messages, which have been steadily released in court filings from Dominion. Quite a bit has come out, so here’s what you need to know: At the end of February, Dominion docs revealed that several Fox hosts, including Ingraham and Hannity, were privately bashing election deniers that were being brought on their shows in 2020.Among the messages: “Sidney Powell is lying,” sent from Tucker Carlson to his producer Alex Pfeiffer on Nov.

John Oliver is having fun with Fox News and its lawsuit with Dominion Voting, again.

If Chelsea Handler had to take a guess as to who would survive for the GOP Presential ticket, it would be Florida governor Ron DeSantis over former President Donald Trump.

A huge release of text messages, emails and deposition transcripts dropped today in the Dominion vs. Fox litigation sheds further light on the scramble among Fox News personalities and Fox Corp. executives to respond to the backlash in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election and then the repercussions after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th.

The New York Times examined the response of those networks to the private messages that were made public in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. According to the NY Times findings, only four publications – Gateway Pundit, Newsmax, the Washington Examiner and the Western Journal – mentioned the suit in some way. However, none of them worked the Fox employees’ private comments into their coverage.

Saturday Night Live went with the week’s biggest media stories for its cold open: the revelations from Dominion Voting Systems bombshell filing in its defamation lawsuit against Fox News. Watch a clip below.

filing earlier this month: That top hosts including Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo were privately horrified that their network was pushing Trump’s “stolen election” narrative – but went on-air with it anyway.“Is there really that much going on at two in the afternoon on Fox News that you can’t cover him live?” the popular “War Room” podcaster asked the crowd. “They don’t respect you, read the depositions.

deposition he gave last month that he knew Fox News Channel was spreading false claims about the 2020 presidential election. Claims that Dominion voting machines were compromised are the basis of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. Darcy said Murdoch’s deposition will be detrimental to the channel, especially the case goes to trial.“It will be devastating for Fox, I mean this is a taste of what’s to come. Imagine Rupert Murdoch on the stand, Lachlan Murdoch on the stand, Sean Hannity on the stand, Tucker Carlson on the stand,” said Darcy. “This will be weeks and weeks of damning headlines, which could really damage Fox’s brand.