Cable news shakeup: Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon out

Two of the biggest stars in cable news have both left their networks and have anchored their final shows.

Tucker Carlson, long-time primetime host of FOX News Channel, and Don Lemon, most recently co-host of CNN This Morning, left their employers for different reasons.

Carlson is said to have parted ways with FNC “by mutual agreement” while Don Lemon was said to have been “let go” at CNN.

KIRO Newsradio hosts Spike O’Neill and Jack Stine both believe they were “fired.” Carlson and Lemon were engulfed in controversy.

Carlson is said to have lied to viewers about, among other things, voting machine fraud in the most recent presidential election.

Lemon was pulled from his primetime slot to host a new morning show on CNN. He said that women were often considered “past their primes after their 20s” when referring to GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley. Lemon was also reportedly tough on co-hosts and staff.

“A week ago, Fox agreed to pay more than $787 million to settle a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s airing of false claims. Carlson was going to testify in that case before they decided to settle,” Stine said.

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“Also, upcoming for Fox News is a $2.3 billion lawsuit against Smartmatic, which Smartmatic does not want to settle. So CEO Rupert Murdoch is looking at a real problem, right? He’s got a lot of hosts, they’re expensive hosts, and a lot of them are going to have to testify in cases that he’s going to lose.”

O’Neill agreed. “They stopped the bleeding because they’re big stars and they didn’t want to have them on the stand being cross-examined in the public arena.” He also said that FOX has a big stable of stars like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham and they could afford to lose Carlson.

As for Lemon, Stine said he was fired “because he’s boring, is unbelievably boring.”

“That’s all we need to say,” Spike said.

Stine suggested the two should do a show together. “It’s called Carlson-Lemon. And it’s just them and they’d have to sit in the studio and one side is red like Tucker Carlson, red conservative.

“On the other side, it’s blue like Don Lemon, lefty. And then they both get to cover the same story. So Tucker does his version of it. And that goes on for five minutes. And then Lemon does his version of it and that’s five minutes and then they turn their chairs and then the whole set turns purple.

“They have to argue and now they’re in the Thunderdome and a huge cage drops down, right? And then they get weaponry but it’s like non-lethal weaponry.”

“They’ll both be fine,” Spike said.

Listen to KIRO Newsradio Middays from 12 noon – 3 p.m. Monday-Friday.