UPDATE, SATURDAY, 12;45 PM PT: Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and Fox News Media President & Executive Editor Jay Wallace sent a memo to employees on Saturday calling the anonymous posts of one of Tucker Carlson’s writers “abhorrent conduct.”
They also said that Carlson would address the incident on his show on Monday night. The writer, Blake Neff, resigned.
“Yesterday we learned that now former employee Blake Neff, a writer on Tucker Carlson Tonight, made horrendous and deeply offensive racist, sexist and homophobic comments under a pseudonym on the forum AutoAdmit,” Scott and Wallace wrote.
They added, “We want to make abundantly clear that Fox News Media strongly condemns this horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior. Neff’s abhorrent conduct on this forum was never divulged to the show or the network until Friday, at which point we swiftly accepted his resignation. Make no mistake, actions such as his cannot and will not be tolerated at any time in any part of our work force.”
CNN Business reported that Neff had been using the pseudonym to post the offensive comments on the online forum.
PREVIOUSLY, FRIDAY, 5:41 PM PT: A top writer for Fox News host Tucker Carlson has resigned after the discovery of an online forum in which he reportedly used a pseudonym to make racist, sexist and other offensive remarks.
CNN Business reported that Tucker Carlson Tonight writer Blake Neff had been posting on the online forum even in recent weeks, using racial stereotypes in his commentary. According to CNN Business, when Neff was contacted for comment Thursday, he referred them to a Fox News spokesperson, who told them on Friday morning that he had resigned. The network confirmed his departure to Deadline.
Neff previously has worked for The Hill and The Daily Caller, the latter a conservative news site that Carlson helped start in 2010. In an interview with Dartmouth’s alumni magazine this month, Neff said of his work for Carlson’s show, “Anything he’s reading off the teleprompter, the first draft was written by me.”
He joined the staff of Tucker Carlson Tonight shortly after it launched in November 2016, according to the magazine.
Neff’s departure comes at the end of a week in which Carlson engaged in a high-profile back-and-forth with Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL).
On Sunday, Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran who lost both of her legs in combat, told CNN that there should be a “national dialogue” on the question of whether to take down the statues of some of the Founding Fathers.
Carlson criticized her answer on his Monday show, calling her “a deeply silly and unimpressive person.”
He played a clip of her remark, then told his audience on Monday night, “It’s a very strong charge and we try not to ever to make it. But in the face of all this, the conclusion can’t be avoided: These people actually hate America.”
Duckworth responded with a tweet the next day. “Does @TuckerCarlson want to walk a mile in my legs and then tell me whether or not I love America?”
He then went on to criticize her again that evening. “To morons like Tammy Duckworth, Washington is just some old white guy who needs to be erased,” he said.
On Friday, The New York Times published an op-ed from Duckworth in which she wrote, “Setting aside the fact that the right wing’s right to lie about me is one of the rights I fought to defend, let me be clear: I don’t want George Washington’s statue to be pulled down any more than I want the Purple Heart that he established to be ripped off my chest. I never said that I did.”