Fox Business abruptly canceled Lou Dobbs Tonight, its most watched show and a prominent platform for one of the most staunch pro-Trump voices in cable news.
The cancellation, reported by the LA Times on Friday, comes just a day after the voting software company Smartmatic filed a libel suit against Fox Corporation, Fox News and three Fox anchors – including Lou Dobbs – for false allegations that their technology was used to commit electoral fraud.
It is not exactly clear why the Dobbs show was canceled. Some media analysts, including CNN’s Brian Stelter, say that despite his assessments, Dobbs was causing problems for Fox Business even before his lawsuit, reporting that his insistence on repeating Trump’s false allegations of electoral fraud scared big business. advertisers. Fox had previously announced that it was considering changes to its line-up after the presidential election, and said on Friday that the cancellation was part of the planned changes.
“As we said in October, Fox News Media regularly considers schedule changes and there are plans to launch new formats as appropriate after the election, including Fox Business – this is part of the planned changes,” said a spokesman for Fox News Media in a statement. “A new 5pm program will be announced in the near future.”
Given these plans for new programs and the problems with advertisers, the emergence of the defamation suit may have accelerated considerations that were already underway.
Dobbs still has a contract with Fox News Media, but the company has no plans to get him back on the air, according to the New York Times. It is unclear what actions Fox can take in relation to its two other anchors cited in the Smartmatic lawsuit, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro.
A right-wing populist who gained prominence on CNN, Dobbs was one of the first to support the racist conspiracy theory of birtherism – which falsely claimed that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States – former President Donald Trump helped popularize . Dobbs later used his Fox Business program to defend the Trump administration and to influence its trade and immigration policies. He also boosted Trump’s disinformation campaign to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 elections.
That support for Trump led the former president to issue a statement supporting Dobbs on Friday: “Lou Dobbs is and was great. Nobody loves America more than Lou. He had a great and faithful following that will follow him closely on his next move, and that segment includes me. “
But that support also put Dobbs and his employer in legal jeopardy. Smartmatic’s lawsuit alleges that Dobbs, as one of Fox Business’s main hosts, ruined the company’s future profits by accusing it of rigging the election. For example, in an episode in November, Dobbs responded favorably to Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said during an interview that Smarmatic was founded by Venezuelans close to the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez “to fix elections”.
CNN’s main media correspondent, Brian Stelter, described the cancellation of a program as popular as Dobbs’s program as “extremely rare”.
“The closest thing to that was when Fox News fired Bill O’Reilly when his secret history of sexual harassment deals was revealed,” said Stelter on Friday. “There is no sign of this with Dobbs. Instead, it is the extreme content of Dobbs that is the problem and its weakness with advertisers. Of course, he was a sycophant of President Trump, one of Trump’s biggest drivers on TV and now there is less use for that. “
Fox News is rebuilding post-Trump
As Vox’s Aaron Rupar reported, Fox News Media channels – particularly his main Fox News channel – have struggled to turn to a post-Trump reality. Although the Fox News Channel was regularly the main news network during the Trump administration, this is no longer the case. As Stelter recently wrote for CNN’s Reliable Sources:
Nielsen’s figures for the month of January were released on Tuesday, and Fox took third place in the three horse news cable race for the first time since 2001. In addition, CNN was the number one channel in all cable channels.
It remains to be seen whether Fox News will be able to recover from those numbers. However, it made changes to do just that – in January, Fox News announced a major shift in daytime and prime time formations, with anchors like Martha MacCallum, Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer losing their slots and being pushed into new programs at the beginning the day. Insiders described the changes as demotion and a sign that the network was struggling to cope with a huge drop in the post-election audience.
As a channel with a specific focus, Fox Business never received the same type of audience as the Fox News Channel. In late 2020, he praised his main programs as having an audience that exceeded 300,000 (compared to Fox News’ average of 1.53 million viewers in the post-election period). But as the main Fox News channel, Fox Business was known to outperform its rivals, such as CNBC – and there is a focus on bringing new programs to the network that can do that. For example, Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic advisor, will soon have his own Fox Business program.