Sean Hannity congratulates Tucker Carlson for skipping evidently fictional vacation to fight 'the mob's crap'

On Tuesday night, Media Matters for America dropped its third installment of unearthed recordings of Fox News host Tucker Carlson saying questionable things to radio host "Bubba the Love Sponge" from 2006 to 2011. In this batch, released via Now This News, Carlson shares some randy thoughts on a 2007 Miss Teen USA contestant representing South Carolina.

Carlson has pointedly refused to apologize for his decade-old comments, and when he was passing the network to fellow Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday night, Hannity said he wanted to "give you a compliment. So Tucker was going to be off this week. ... But it becomes a busy news week and he's not going to take the mob's crap. And he came into work to stand up to this, and I want the great viewers of this channel to know that." He ended by telling Carlson to "have a great rest of vacation you were supposed to have."

Carlson did not correct Hannity. But a Fox News spokesperson later told The Washington Post that Hannity misspoke and Carlson was always scheduled to host his show this week, adding to The Hill's Joe Concha that Carlson will be on the air for the rest of the week, not on vacation. There is speculation that Carlson will take next week off, though, which would seem to fit a pattern at Fox News.

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