REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
- In a rare interview, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott addressed her most controversial employee.
- "I will never discuss those conversations," Scott, who is vaccinated, said of Tucker Carlson.
- Scott did not praise nor condemn the host, who has been on an anti-vaccine tear this year.
Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott granted a rare interview to The Hollywood Reporter and refused to weigh in on her most-viewed host's anti-vaccine rhetoric.
Scott, who said she's vaccinated, touted Fox PSAs for the vaccine and personal testimony of several anchors who've shared their experience getting the jab.
Yet when it came to whether Carlson's rhetoric alarms her, she drew an iron curtain and presented a united front.
"I have a regular cadence of conversations with a wide variety of talent here, including our primetime talent," she told THR. "I will never discuss those conversations. That's not who I am. I am loyal first. I am loyal to everyone on the team, whether they are someone on the news side or the opinion side. To me, they are all people who work for Fox News Media, and I respect the privacy of those conversations."
Even as the network made an all-out blitz to promote the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines back in July, Carlson contradicted his colleagues and continued his months-long pattern of making baseless claims about the shots' safety and personally attacking medical experts advocating for the inoculations, telling his average of 3 to 4 million viewers to ignore "medical advice on television."
Carlson has also frequently invited novelist and former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson on his show, despite his claims about COVID-19 and vaccines being thoroughly debunked.
After repeated requests from Insider, Fox News still will not say if Tucker Carlson has been vaccinated or if he plans to be.
In line with Fox's PR messaging around the pro-free speech and anti-cancel culture ethos of their cable and streaming programming, Scott compared the powerful 25-year-old network to a regular American family.
"When Trump was running [in 2016], my brother was a Bernie supporter, my other brother was a Hillary supporter, my mom was a Trump supporter, my extended family was all over the place," she said. "And you know what? We all love each other. And we could all debate it, and we could all talk about things and we could all have different opinions. And like The Five or other shows, we could all sit around a table and debate it and it didn't become an ugly situation. And my life is still that way.
"I have a diverse group of friends with varying political backgrounds and interests," she continued. "I think there is an intolerance to different points of view and opinions. But I celebrate different points of view. I celebrate diverse thought. I think we all learn from each other. It doesn't mean at the end of the day you're going to agree."
Carlson maintains the record for the most-watched show in the history of cable news.