Fox Business cancels ‘Lou Dobbs Tonight’
LOS ANGELES – Fox Business Network’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” whose host has trumpeted unfounded assertions of voter fraud in the 2020 election, has been canceled.
In a statement Friday, Fox News said the move was part of routine programming alterations that it had foreshadowed in an announcement last fall.
Fox News “regularly considers programming changes and plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate post-election, including on Fox Business — this is part of those planned changes,” the company said.
Whether the cancellation ends Dobbs’ career with Fox News wasn’t addressed, and the company had no further comment. The former CNN host started his show at Fox in March 2011.
The statement appeared to distance the show’s end from a multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuit filed against Fox and three of its hosts, including Dobbs, by the election technology company Smartmatic. In a previous statement,
Fox News said it would “vigorously defend against this meritless lawsuit in court.”
Dobbs, who was signed to Fox News by its former chief executive Roger Ailes in 2011, has long been the company’s most outspoken supporter of Donald Trump’s economic and immigration policies.
In the weeks after the election, he expressed anger on his program that the Republican Party did not do more to act on the former president’s claims that the election was rigged in favor of Joe Biden.
Dobbs also gave free rein to Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell to push conspiracy theories about the election that were either rejected or never presented in court. Giuliani and Powell also are defendants in the Smartmatic defamation suit.
The replacement for “Lou Dobbs Tonight” will be announced soon, Fox News said. The show last aired on Friday, with a guest host sitting in for Dobbs, who had no immediate statement.
An interim show, “Fox Business Tonight,” will air starting at 5 p.m. EST on Monday, with rotating hosts Jackie DeAngelis and David Asman and repeat at 7 p.m. EST.