Fox News producer absent after on-screen message calling President Biden a ‘wannabe dictator’

NEW YORK — A longtime Tucker Carlson producer is missing from Fox News after being found responsible for an on-air headline referring to President Joe Biden as a “wannabe dictator” due to the indictment former President Donald Trump.

The producer, Alex McCaskill, confirmed his release in an Instagram post. Fox News had no comment Friday.

He remained at Fox after Carlson, the network’s most popular personality, was fired on April 24. The reason for Carlson’s sudden ouster, less than a week after Fox agreed to pay $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems to settle a defamation case, has never been explained. explained publicly.

It was during the final minutes of Carlson’s old time slot on Tuesday that the message appeared under separate boxes on the screen showing Biden and Trump speaking. It read: “Aspiring dictator speaks at the White House after the arrest of his political rival. »

Carlson, in a Monologue on Twitter posted Thursday, said “the women who run the network freaked out” about the post and reprimanded the person responsible. Carlson did not name the producer, but said he was “considered one of the most knowledgeable people in the building.”

The producer offered to resign with two weeks’ notice, but was asked to clean out his office and leave immediately, he said.

Fox, in a statement released Wednesday, said the chyron had been taken apart and the problem had been “resolved,” without further explanation.

In an Instagram post posted to Twitter by Justin Baragona of the Daily Beast, McCaskill is photographed outside Fox’s Manhattan office, holding a box.

“Today was my last day at Fox,” the post under her photo read. “It’s been a crazy 10 years and it’s been the best place I’ve ever worked because of the great people I’ve met. But the time has come. I asked them to let me go, and they finally did. To all my friends out there: I will miss you forever.

A call and text message to a phone listed as McCaskill’s were not immediately returned.

Many Biden critics have suggested that politics was behind special prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump for hoarding classified documents and resisting government attempts to recover them. Biden has not commented on the matter.

McCaskill was named this spring in a lawsuit filed by a former Fox producer, Abby Grossberg, who also worked on Carlson’s team. Her lawsuit said McCaskill “habitually belittled female employees” at Fox. He said a room at Fox set aside for employees to pump breast milk was a “waste of space” and should be replaced with a room allowing men to tan their testicles, according to the lawsuit.

Fox has denied the allegations in Grossberg’s lawsuit.

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Associated Press correspondent Beatrice Dupuy and researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.