(Not sure if Politics would be the appropriate page for this question, if not please point me to a better one.)
There are several times when a scandal flares up, and the person involved takes a "pre-planned vacation" shortly afterward. Most recently, it was discovered that Fox News political analyst Tucker Carlson's head writer, Blake Neff, has been posting extremely racist things in anonymous online forums, and as a result, Carlson is leaving the network for a few days in a "long-planned" fishing trip-- on a Tuesday.
Many if not most people aren't fooled by this excuse, and it's pretty clear the network wants to get Carlson off the air for a while until things die down. I would think it would be much more respectable and face-saving for Carlson to say "I'm postponing my show for a while to restructure my staff and reconsider the message that may have been conveyed to my viewers." Why would the network opt instead for such a flimsy lie?
Edit: I went looking for other examples of this behavior, since I knew I had seen it before, but it actually seems fairly unique to Fox News. My question still stands, but I've made it less generalized.