Tucker Carlson’s playbook for news-by-soundbite will succeed beyond Fox News
When Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News, it made the headlines in the UK because of the viral soundbites he was a master at. TalkTV and GBNews are following the same formula, write Eliot Wilson
It is a measure of the penetration of our culture by the United States that Fox News’s decision last week to fire Tucker Carlson, the host of its nightly politics show, piqued the interest of Brits too. Fox News isn’t available in the UK without a VPN, but the channel thrives on its cannibalisation for social media platforms. Carlson is a phenomenon in US politics, a raging, incredulous caricature.
The network has not had a good month. A fortnight ago, it settled a legal dispute with Dominion, a manufacturer of electronic voting machines and software which several Fox hosts and their guests alleged had been manipulated to prevent President Trump winning re-election last November. The deal involved Fox admitting that some of its claims were “false” and making a payment of $787.5m, one of the largest sums ever disclosed in a US defamation case.
The fallout engulfed Carlson. He left Fox News with immediate effect, though the precise reasons are unclear: was it because he had peddled the Dominion lie, or because of a separate suit alleging sexism and anti-Semitism surrounding his show? Or was the truth that Rupert Murdoch, had simply tired of his omnifarious show pony and decided to demonstrate that no-one was indispensable?
The axe fell and Carlson was gone, along with his executive producer Justin Wells, a Fox veteran. So ended a seven-year partnership which had delivered ratings gold. Tucker Carlson Tonight immediately outperformed its predecessor, On The Record, and handily beat its CNN and MSNBC. In 2020, it became the highest rated show in US cable news history, with an average nightly audience of 4.3 million. It was dominant among voting age Americans and it was even the current affairs talk show of choice for Democrats, according to Nielsen/MRI Fusion.
And yet. If it was Murdoch’s intention to prove that no individual was bigger than Fox News itself, he may have miscalculated. On the one hand, the station felt Carlson’s absence like a lost limb: viewing figures instantly fell by 21 per cent, and, in the 25-54 demographic, the rebranded Fox News Tonight fell behind CNN. The first of a series of interim hosts, Brian Kilmeade, a briskly offensive one-time informal sounding board for the Trump administration, was heavily criticised. One Carolinian voiced Murdoch’s worst fears: “No Tucker, no Fox”.
Meanwhile, Carlson posted a video to Twitter last Wednesday at 8pm, his Fox News timeslot, a simple but professional to-camera piece. After the usual aw-shucks epiphany that “most of the debates you see on television” are “stupid” and “irrelevant”, he praised the power of “honest people saying what’s true, calmly and without embarrassment”. Here is the kicker: that video was watched by 1.8 million people within an hour. The previous day’s edition of Fox News Tonight brought in only 1.7 million viewers.
Corporate heft and financial strength are still the guns of the US media war. Fox News will survive the loss. But Carlson’s modus operandi has always been in the sound bite, in repeating again and again what his viewers want, on what drives the outrage, whether that be on cable TV or on social media. Name recognition, in which Carlson beats all comers, has huge importance, as does content. Ominously, he identified some of the subjects currently neglected: civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change.
The networks are already attuned to producing material which can be easily clipped and amplified on social media. Indeed, it seems to be the gamble of right wing shows here in the UK as well. It is a testament to this that Piers Morgan, whose TalkTV show has 30,000 regular viewers by traditional standards, has instead been boasting of reaching one million YouTube subscribers. These are viewers reeled in by the Carlson-style soundbites, unlikely to watch a whole hour of the British broadcaster, but content to consume short clips, under ten minutes, of the most fiery bits of the show.
Tucker Carlson has more depth than the far-right idiot savant he can sometimes seem. If anyone can wage a news insurrection which puts the major networks on the back foot, it is surely the blinkingly outraged contrarian that Time magazine called “the most powerful conservative in America”. Especially when he has the power of the disillusioned internet on his side.