It looks like cable news as an industry has just sunk beneath the waves.

Tucker Carlson, the top-rated host at Fox News, is leaving the network.

The abrupt departure of the controversial prime time figure comes a week after Fox News reached a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s promotion of former President Donald Trump’s false 2020 election claims.

That bombshell settlement — the biggest media payout in history — prompted many to question if Rupert Murdoch would make major changes at the network.

Carlson found himself embroiled in serious controversy throughout his time at Fox News. In recent weeks, a lawsuit from a former booker at the network, Abby Grossberg, accused Carlson’s staff of making anti-Semitic jokes, liberal use of the word “cunt” in the office, and casual misogyny.

Somebody told jokes about Jewish people and somebody said the c-word, so Carlson is out?

Really? The top-rated host?

This was Fox News’ statement…

NEW YORK — April 24, 2023 — FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.

Mr. Carlson’s last program was Friday April 21st. Fox News Tonight will air live at 8 PM/ET starting this evening as an interim show helmed by rotating FOX News personalities until a new host is named.

FOX News Media operates the FOX News Channel (FNC), FOX Business Network (FBN), FOX News Digital, FOX News Audio, FOX News Books, the direct-to-consumer streaming services FOX Nation and FOX News International and the free ad-supported television service FOX Weather. Currently the number one network in all of cable, FNC has also been the most watched television news channel for more than 21 consecutive years, while FBN ranks among the top business channels on cable. Owned by Fox Corporation, FOX News Media reaches nearly 200 million people each month.

We’re gonna say there will be a pretty good haircut coming off that 200 million in the coming days.

Carlson was increasingly a bad fit at Fox News, because he simply refused to go along with the mainstream narrative on issue after issue. It’s what made his program interesting to watch; he’d have unusual takes on things, most of which were either spot-on or at minimum raised serious questions and exposed real flaws in the Beltway groupthink which has so warped the country’s public policy. For example, Carlson has been painted as fringe when it comes to immigration, thanks to his citation of the Great Replacement narrative by which the Democrats would import an entirely new electorate from the Third World to offset and overwhelm the traditional American one which opposes Democrat policies.

For 20 years Democrat pundits were outright giddy over what they saw as the inevitable success of that plan. Now Carlson is crazy for talking about it.

Take his criticism of the Beltway uniparty crowd and their promotion of an endless war in Ukraine. That’s supposedly fringe, even though a huge swath of America opposes limitless U.S. spending on that war and the Speaker of the House repeatedly says he opposes a blank check for Ukraine.

But Carlson’s critique of the Beltway groupthink is why he’s out at Fox News. It isn’t because some of his staffers were mean to Abby Grossberg. Fox might well try to say otherwise, but everybody knows it’s a lie.

Dan Bongino and Maria Bartiromo also being dumped out are a good indication that Fox has decided it’ll be controlled opposition and not a place for independent thinkers or actual conservatives.

And when conservative viewers abandon Fox, it’s going to be the end of cable news altogether.

Which is probably a good thing, as streaming services and podcasts are venues for the transmission of information anyway. Here at Hayride Central, we quit watching Fox News several years ago and we’ll only really catch segments of Fox shows (mostly Carlson, as it happens) on YouTube or Rumble after the fact.

Now they won’t even get that from us, and it’s our guess that we won’t be alone in that.