The Media Freakout Over Tucker Carlson Moving His Show to Twitter is Proof the Information Landscape Has Changed Forever
AP. Shutterstock Images.You don't have to be a political junkie or news addict to be interested in the way Fox's firing of Tucker Carlson a few weeks back has played out:
No matter which direction you socio-political leanings … um, lean … there's no arguing Carlson's impact on the culture. He was the only figure on cable news to go after politicians in both parties and ask important questions about the US role in the war in Ukraine. And the only one willing to throw caution to wind and dig deep into the historically significant hot button issues of our times, they're effect on his own career be damned:
And the reaction to Carlson's departure from Fox News has held up a mirror to the rest of the media landscape. Before the writer's strike, every late night talk show made jokes at his expense. Which is of course their job. But Tucker's audience fired back, pointing out how much his ratings dwarf theirs. But not before ditching Fox en masse, as the netork's entire prime time lineup is now drawing less than 1/3 the viewers they had when he was doing the 8-9pm spot.
Fox, to their credit, did what megacorporations always do when they make a wildly unpopular decision. Which is point fingers, blame somebody else, and savagely smear the person they loved and admired just a few days earlier. Every day, Fox leaks another "bombshell" hot mic video of Carlson during the breaks on his old show, in an effort to make him look like a monster. But on the whole, just make him look like a regular dude, bantering with his crew:
Even the video that was supposed to be the most damning because he said the girlfriend of some guy in a news story was "Yummy," just came across as a guy joking with his co-workers. And it's an own goal for Fox to go there in the first place, since long before they hired Carlson, their CEO Rupert Murdoch was such a notorious creep to the hot blondes who worked for him, they made a movie about it. Called, ironically enough, Bombshell.
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So since the firing, it's been fascinating watching this most public of dramas play out. And to wait for Carlson to make his move. Whether he'd jump to a rival TV network. Go off and start his own podcast brand, the way Megyn Kelly did. Go to one of the right-leaning websites like Rumble or Daily Wire. Or take the first offer that came along, which happened to be for 11 figures.
Well, we finally got an answer. And while it seems like an odd choice, that might only be because no one has tried this before. Tucker announced he's taking his talents to one of few remaining place where you can reach an unlimited audience and say what you want:
Case in point, by the time you've watched that video, it'll already have been viewed 20 million times on Twitter alone. And that doesn't include reTweets and YouTube videos discussing it. Those are "Kylie Jenner sideboob" numbers. To watch a 50-something unemployed guy standing in his house in a button down shirt talk vaguely about his plans for the future. That's the kind of reach Carlson has.
Again, the move to Twitter is interesting for a lot of reasons. One, because he has a non-compete clause with Fox, and they reportedly are in no hurry to negotiate a way out of it. So it's possible going straight to a social media platform is his legal work-around. We'll see.
Second, it's hard to know how exactly this will work. Twitter exists to give short, concise bits of information that can be consumed during the average bathroom break by a generation of men who now pee sitting down. That is the opposite of Carlson's style, since he'll do an entire five hour week of shows on 1/6 or four minutes on Dave Portnoy's pro-shark propaganda.
Third, and most fascinating of all, is the reaction to Carlson's announcement. Which has his former competitors across the media world shook.
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There's more of this out there, but you get the point.
I can't think of a more perfect way to encapsulate how the world of news, information, and opinion is changing before our eyes than this one. The numbers don't lie. Cable news is standing in its own grave. Streaming platforms and social media are doing to it what it did to newsprint starting about 25 years ago. Kids growing up right now will never understand how people used to find out what's going on by plunking yourself down in front of a TV during certain hours, listening to someone who takes their marching orders from a giant media conglomerate, while waiting patiently through ads for My Pillow and Jesus.
Carlson isn't the first one to take advantage of this paradigm shift. But he is the first to take it straight to a free speech platform that everyone has on their phone. And the fact that people still working for the old media are already scrambling to figure out how to censor him before he's even uttered a word? That says it all. These are interesting times, indeed.