Fox News canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” the program presented by Donald Trump’s staunchest supporter on television and his claims of electoral fraud in the 2020 election, the Times learned.
The Dobbs show, which airs twice at night at 5 pm and 7 pm on the Fox Business Network, will have its final airing on Friday, according to a Fox News representative who confirmed the cancellation. Starting next week, the show will be called “Fox Business Tonight”, with replacement hosts Jackie DeAngelis and David Asman, who replaced Dobbs on Friday.
Dobbs, 75, remains under contract with Fox News, but most likely will not appear on the company’s networks again. In addition to his Fox Business Network program, he occasionally appeared on Fox News as a commentator.
The cancellation comes a day after the voting software company Smartmatic filed a $ 2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and three of its hosts – Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. The company says the hosts have perpetuated lies and misinformation about Smartmatic’s role in the election, damaging its business and reputation.
But people familiar with the discussions say the decision to end the Dobbs program was being considered before legal issues arose with Smartmatic. (Fox News said it maintains its 2020 election coverage and “will defend this case without merit in court.”)
“As we said in October, Fox News Media regularly considers changes to the schedule and there are plans to launch new formats as appropriate after the election, including at Fox Business,” the representative said in a statement. “This is part of the planned changes. A new 5pm program will be announced in the near future. “
Lou Dobbs presents “Lou Dobbs Tonight” at Fox Business Network Studios in 2018.
(Steven Ferdman / Getty Images)
The network has reevaluated its programming on Fox News and Fox Business Network since the fall and has implemented a series of changes to the program and host in anticipation of President Joe Biden’s administration entering the White House.
Fox News recently hired former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow with the intention of offering him a daily program. The longtime former CNBC presenter immediately becomes a candidate to replace Dobbs on Fox Business Network.
Last month, Fox News changed its daytime schedule and pulled one of its high-profile news anchors, Martha MacCallum, out of its 7 pm schedule. Fox News has turned the schedule into an opinion program with rotating presenters until a permanent is named.
After leading the ratings for most of 2020, Fox News has lagged behind CNN and MSNBC since the election, as conservative viewers have shut down. The network’s competitive position has improved in the past two weeks as the number of casual viewers that CNN tends to attract in intense news cycles has started to decline.
The decision on Dobbs – whose views are often incendiary – indicates that Fox News is considering the right balance of comments and news to satisfy conservative viewers, who turn to him as an alternative to so-called mainstream media, without alienating voters less ideological that make up a significant part of your audience.
But viewers shouldn’t expect a big change, as Dobbs’ hour is likely to be filled by a conservative opinion presenter.
Dobbs, who signed on to Fox News by his former chief executive Roger Ailes in 2011, has long been the most outspoken defender of Trump’s economic and immigration policy. In the weeks after the election, he expressed anger at his program that the Republican Party did not do more to act on the former president’s claims that the election was rigged in Biden’s favor.
Dobbs also gave free rein to Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell, to promote conspiracy theories about the election that were rejected or never presented in court. Giuliani and Powell are also defendants in the Smartmatic defamation process.
In his November 30 program, Dobbs told Powell that he believed Trump needed to take “drastic action, dramatic action to make sure that the integrity of this election is understood or the lack thereof, the crimes that were committed against him and the people American. And if the Justice Department doesn’t want to do that, if the FBI can’t do it, then we have to find other resources within the federal government. “
Dobbs has always been a provocateur. His strident anti-immigration views led to his departure in 2009 from CNN, where for years he was a signature talent and a pioneer of business news on TV with his program “Moneyline”. He won a Peabody award for his coverage of the 1987 stock market crash.
When he arrived on Fox News, he immediately caused controversy by questioning the American citizenship of then President Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii.
Dobbs’s show had an average of around 300,000 viewers per night at 7 pm Eastern time, the largest audience on any business news channel. But his program was a loss leader for Fox Business Network, as major advertisers stayed away from him, probably for fear of consumer boycotts.