Fox News has reportedly parted ways with longtime producer Alex McCaskill, following an on-air headline that referred to President Joe Biden as a "wannabe dictator." The message appeared during the last minutes of Tucker Carlson's former time slot on Tuesday, under separate on-screen boxes that showed Biden and former President Donald Trump. In a Twitter monologue posted on Thursday, Carlson said that "the women who run the network panicked" about the post and scolded the person responsible. McCaskill confirmed his exit in an Instagram post, in which he said he asked to be let go and that it was his last day at Fox. Fox News did not comment on McCaskill's departure.
McCaskill had remained at Fox after Carlson was fired in April, but he was named this spring in a lawsuit filed by a former Fox producer, Abby Grossberg. Grossberg's lawsuit claimed that McCaskill "habitually belittled female employees" at Fox and said that he had made inappropriate comments about a room set aside for employees to pump breast milk. Fox has denied the allegations in Grossberg's lawsuit.
The on-air headline that led to McCaskill's departure referred to Biden as a "wannabe dictator" because of the indictment of former President Trump. Plenty of Biden critics have suggested that politics was behind Trump's indictment by special prosecutor Jack Smith on charges of hoarding classified documents and resisting government attempts to retrieve them. Biden has not commented on the case.
Fox News has been in the spotlight recently following the network's agreement to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787 million to end a defamation case. This was less than a week before Carlson's sudden ouster, which has never been publicly explained.