When it comes to cable-news personalities, there’s always a question of where the pundit ends and where the network begins. Channels like Fox News, Newsmax, or MSNBC aim to attract as many viewers as they can by confirming the biases of their audiences without offending their sponsors and advertisers. Individual personalities sometimes become emblematic of the network, as happened with Keith Olbermann and then Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, and Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson on Fox News. But it’s always unclear how much autonomy the hosts have in setting the agendas for their shows—or, more pointedly, if the substance of what they say on air matters at all.
Back in late April, when Carlson’s show was yanked off the airwaves at Fox, I wrote a column arguing that the networks were the real stars of these shows, despite all the ways the Internet has placed an emphasis on individual personalities in the news business. Those of us in the media who have appointed ourselves as ombudsmen of cable news—I count myself as part of this crew—tend to obsess over the faces onscreen. Carlson, in particular, was heavily analyzed and mythologized. Depending on who you asked, he was popular because he was spouting white-nationalist propaganda to a racist audience, or he was a uniquely talented communicator who could cut through the nonsense of mainstream media. In reality, the modern news consumer, saddled with an unprecedented number of choices, most likely just scrolls through the day’s news without much thought to the peculiarities of the people behind the takes.
On Tuesday, almost a full month after he announced his new show would air on Twitter, Carlson released a ten-minute video on the platform with the caption “Ep. 1.” The set was writer’s-retreat chic—an old-timey lantern and decorative books sat on shelves behind him, and Carlson, a bit overdressed for the occasion in a blazer and tie, sat at a round blond-wood table. As far as débuts go, “Tucker on Twitter” was more puzzling than provocative. He led his show with the Kakhovka dam disaster—certainly an important story, but not exactly the typical Fox News fare about wokeness, drag shows, and trans children. His point, which was neatly made in the course of five minutes of monologue, was that unwavering support for Ukraine had become something of a tautology in the media, one that clouded the way in which people assessed blame in the war. The second half of his monologue was about U.F.O.s and what he called a “whistle-blower” who had come forward and claimed the United States had possession of multiple downed non-human aircrafts, and even had remnants of their pilots. “In a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell. The story of the millennium,” Carlson said. He alleged that the Washington Post and the New York Times had both ignored the story, before concluding that this type of suppression of the news was why the country is so “dysfunctional.”
These stories, in Carlson’s estimation, are linked because they offend the powers that be, which, in his telling, are politicians, wealthy corporations, and, importantly, the mainstream media. “A small group of people control access to all relative information and the rest of us don’t know,” Carlson said. “We’re allowed to yap all we want about racism, but go ahead and talk about something that really matters and see what happens. If you keep it up, they’ll make you be quiet.” He then shared an anecdote about “Western tourists” who began travelling to Russia in the early nineteen-seventies, and met Russians who had a “warped” understanding of what was actually happening in America: they believed that the United States was perpetually gripped by poverty, starvation, and an unyielding “race war.” The Russians who “understood what was really going on in the rest of the world” had been listening to shortwave-radio broadcasts under the cover of blankets to insure that their neighbors wouldn’t hear. Twitter, he proclaimed, was today’s version of the “shortwave radio under the blankets.” The show closed with an image that looked like what would happen if you told an A.I. bot to paint Tucker Carlson in the style of Andrew Wyeth.
Carlson is positioning his new venture as outsider media. In the second episode, which came out on Thursday, he argued that America has loosened its taboo on child molestation, pointing to a Wall Street Journal investigation about how Instagram is used to facilitate the trafficking of child pornography. (Meta, Instagram’s parent company, said it is addressing the issue in various ways, including the creation of an internal task force.) Carlson then veered off on a lengthy diatribe about how the term “white supremacy” remains largely undefined. This hewed a little closer to the Fox News standard, but repeated the same theme as the début: America’s moral core is crumbling because the élites are deluding the public. We can expect that in future episodes, the words “New York Times” will be uttered in nearly every monologue, not as a source or citation but as the paragon for all the lying the media is willing to do to protect the aforementioned powers that be.
Carlson will also likely talk about his old job at Fox News, and the ways that corporate media tried to stop him from telling the truth. He will almost certainly seed most of his episodes with some phrase that could—and often should—be interpreted as deeply bigoted. (In this episode, he described Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, as being “sweaty and ratlike” and referred to him as “our shifty, dead-eyed Ukrainian friend in the tracksuit.”) His particular brand of populism does not lie so much in economic or material factors but rather in an idea of how the élites manipulate the news to oppress what he often calls “all of you.” The rich and powerful, as Carlson frames it, have a bag of tricks to distract the public from what’s really going on in the world. “ ‘Stop asking how we got so rich,’ ” he said in the voice of one of these hypothetical power brokers. “ ‘Here’s another story about racism. Go eat each other.’ ”
The idea that the media would sow racial division in order to suppress multiracial solidarity against corporate overlords seems more like a staple of Marxist movements in the sixties and seventies than a right-wing talking point. The Carlson-watchers in the liberal media will quickly and rightfully point out that Carlson most likely doesn’t imagine immigrants, Black people, or ethnic minorities among the deluded masses he hopes to liberate, yet there’s still persuasive power in positioning oneself as a former insider who can see through the deceptions of the élites.
And yet none of that really means that “Tucker on Twitter,” which has racked up a hundred million “views” to date, will be able to reinsert its host into the center of the news world. Outsider media is, by its very definition, a niche product. It’s a truism in big sports media that Monday belongs to the N.F.L., and more specifically to the Dallas Cowboys. All sports talk shows must lead with what happened to the Cowboys, because that’s what the audience demands. When I was starting out as a sports journalist, I was incredibly resistant to this mandate because I was naïve enough to believe that what I found interesting would find its audience amid all the clamor about what happened in Dallas. If the producers of “Tucker on Twitter” similarly stay committed to covering stories that fall well outside the typical red meat of gender panic, Black Lives Matter fearmongering, and xenophobia that Carlson regularly fed his viewers at Fox News, they might find themselves in a similar spot to that of an N.B.A. reporter on a Monday during the N.F.L. season. No amount of fame, personality, or bombastic “truthtelling” can overcome that. ♦
