The View Co-Hosts Celebrate Tucker Carlson's Firing By Doing the Wave

The news that contentious Fox News host Tucker Carlson has parted ways with the network made the rounds pretty quickly on Monday morning. In a bit of kismet that proved too fortuitous to pass up, the announcement came while ABC's The View was airing live, and the co-hosts couldn't help but break into a celebration worthy of a crowd at a major sporting event.

"Word has just come down that Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways," said moderator Whoopi Goldberg as the show returned from commercial break. As the studio audience broke into hooting and applause, Goldberg continued, "They thank him for his service to the network as host and prior to that as a contributor." Goldberg then looked to the other co-hosts on the panel — Sara Haines, Ana Navarro, Sunny Hostin, and Alyssa Farrah-Griffin — and led them in doing the wave.

"The View" hosts do The Wave after announcing that Tucker Carlson has left Fox News. pic.twitter.com/Sh26Vqsjrb

— The Recount (@therecount) April 24, 2023

Carlson had hosted the primetime opinion program Tucker Carlson Tonight since 2016, from which perch he railed against liberals, Black Lives Matter, and anyone whom he could tag with the label "woke," all while espousing what former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol characterized as "ethno-nationalism." Most recently, Carlson was caught up in Dominion Voting Systems' lawsuit, which Fox News settled by agreeing to pay $787.5 million for pushing false conspiracy theories about the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election. In the discovery phase of the lawsuit, internal Fox News documents surfaced, including texts and emails in which Carlson admitted the stolen-election claims were "absurd," that Donald Trump's spokesperson Sidney Powell was "lying," and that he "passionately" hated Trump.

The April 24 episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight was Carlson's last show with the network. Starting Monday night, Fox News will air an interim program, Fox News Tonight, hosted by a rotating lineup of guest hosts, until a permanent replacement can be found.

The co-hosts of The View have been vocally opposed to Carlson's rhetoric for years now, including the panel rejecting Carlson's framing of the January 6th Capitol riots as "mostly peaceful chaos" and Ana Navarro calling him out for espousing "replacement theory" and contributing to the climate of white nationalism behind the Buffalo supermarket shooting in 2022.

The View airs weekdays at 11:00 AM ET on ABC. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.