On April 24, 2023, news broke that influential Fox News host Tucker Carlson had been ousted from the network. Fox News said it had "agreed" to part ways and that it wanted to "thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor."
Soon after the news spread, Twitter users claimed that Tucker Carlson had died.
On April 25, 2023, another Twitter user posted a digitally edited article with a fake headline claiming "Tucker Carlson has died from suicide."
We have found no evidence that is the case. The above tweet also appears to replace the headline of this CNN article with a fake one. If Carlson had died, it would have been major headline news. There is also no official confirmation from Carlson's representatives and his family.
Instead, the news headlines have been dominated by Carlson's ouster from Fox News. His departure came a week after Fox News settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million over the network's dissemination of election lies; Carlson also was exposed for disparaging his colleagues. Abby Grossberg, a former booker also filed a lawsuit against Fox News, alleging sexism on Carlson's show.
During his time at Fox, Carlson was hugely popular with viewers. He was often accused of racism and of propagating the "great replacement theory," which posits that Americans are being replaced by immigrants. He has also been the subject of numerous fact checks on this website.
This is not the first death hoax surrounding Carlson. In May 2017, a rumor spread that he had been killed in an automobile collision.
Death hoaxes about celebrities and public figures are common, and often emerge when a big news story brings the individual into the spotlight, which results in more engagement with the fake news. In our past analysis of death hoaxes, we learned this form of junk news, designed to get gullible readers to pay attention because a famous person is involved, is often clickbait, or in rare cases simply misreporting based on a misunderstanding.
Given that there has been no official confirmation from Carlson's team, and no real reporting on this, we rate this claim as "False."