A trip that pundit Tucker Carlson took to Hungary to interview Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2021 was not authorized by Fox News, the network that later fired him, according to a new book.
In a forthcoming book about the inner workings of the network in recent months, excerpts from which he shared with the Daily Beast, journalist Brian Stelter writes that Carlson “whipped his show up into an infomercial for Viktor Orbán’s increasingly autocratic, patriarchal nation,” without permission from Fox to do so.
The pundit was planning a second trip to the European nation the following year, Stelter reported, but Fox News top brass reined him in.
Fox pulled Carlson off the air in April, days after it agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems hundreds of millions of dollars to settle claims of defamation regarding President Biden’s 2020 victory. He remains under contract with the network and has since launched a new project on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Carlson recently took another trip to Hungary for a segment on his X show.