After quietly disappearing from Newsmax over the summer, former primetime host Grant Stinchfield is speaking out against his previous employer—and accusing the conservative network of canceling his show because he refused to go after Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on air.
In the first episode of a new independent podcast and YouTube show titled Uncensored, Stinchfield lays out in detail why he believes he was fired from the network despite a surge in ratings following the 2020 election when some viewers abandoned Fox for calling Arizona—and therefore the presidency—for Joe Biden.
Stinchfield explained that it was “not my choice” to leave the network and that he “wanted to stay” but was ultimately let go because he wasn’t able to make sufficient ratings “inroads” against his 8 p.m. time slot competitor Tucker Carlson.
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“So what did Newsmax want me to do to make those strides? Well, if you can believe it, they wanted me to go after Tucker Carlson, to attack him,” Stinchfield, who was averaging around 300,000 viewers to Carlson’s 3 million, said. “And I had a real hard time with this because to me, Tucker Carlson, I would say, is number two to President Trump as the leader of the Republican Party.”
While there were “little things” he could find to disagree on, Stinchfield said he believed “the fight to save America, especially now with President Trump gone, was far too important than to go after Tucker Carlson.”
But that wasn’t “good enough” for the Newsmax bosses. “They wanted me to go after him on a nightly basis,” he said. “They wanted me to hammer him and honestly, I gently refused.”
Stinchfield was replaced this past June by former Fox News host Eric Bolling, who took over the primetime slot and recently called Carlson an “alleged American” after clips from his show were used by Russian state media as propaganda to support its invasion of Ukraine.
The Daily Beast has reached out to a representative from Newsmax for comment.
