After he was fired from Fox in the wake of a massive $787.5 settlement to settle a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, host Tucker Carlson announced that he would be doing weekly broadcasts on Twitter.
The first video from Carlson was a huge success, garnering 120 million views, which led some to suggest that “legacy media” was dying and totally irrelevant in the age of social media.
But subsequent episodes of Carlson’s Twitter broadcasts have not been nearly as successful, according to The Guardian, which reports that it appears Fox was exactly what made Carlson a star in the first place and continues to pursue legal actions against him for breach of the non-compete clause in his contract with them.
Fox has struggled to fill a hole in its primetime schedule as guest hosts try to replicate or replace Carlson’s blend of preppy ties and hard-right invective. But on Twitter, viewer numbers have fallen for Carlson too. Carlson’s most recent episode, on Hunter Biden’s plea deal on tax and gun charges, attracted fewer than 15m views.
From 120 million views to 15 million in a matter of weeks. That’s some major disinterest, and it suggests that Carlson and anyone else who tries to fight against the established news media model is facing a possibly intractable problem, according to Brian Stelter, the former host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” Fox has all the leverage while Carlson has none.
“I think it’s very clear that Fox would like to keep him off the air … for as long as they contractually can. That is not always how these things go. There’s often a compromise between network and talent. Instead of being benched for two years, he might accept one year. But I think from the tea-leaf reading, Fox wants him benched for the entire rest of the contract.”
“There’s a long history in TV news of anchors being put on the proverbial bench,” Stelter added. “It’s called pay or play. A network [doesn’t] have to play you, it can choose to just pay. [In Carlson’s case], they are paying him but they don’t have to play him.”
So where does that leave Carlson? Simply put, in a no-win situation with diminishing returns that fail to even help him get another position with any other networks as long as he’s still tied to Fox.
In other words, Tucker Carlson is quickly becoming irrelevant, and for a person who gets paid to broadcast their opinions, that’s the worst fate imaginable, though it’s certainly the one he deserves.
