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Why Fox News Can't Just Replace Tuck-tuck [1]
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Date: 2023-04-30
tldr: Tucker Carlson is not Bill O’Reilly he’s Roger Ailes
Slightly longer version:
In 2010 Carlson and a Dick Cheney apprentice named Neil Patel founded The Daily Caller, one of a crop of new-generation online ‘ideology and news’ outlets that were popping up during this period, following on the success of HuffPost in 2005. In fact the pitch for most of these sites was “Huffington Post but for conservatives”. After the dust cleared the Big 3 were probably Beck’s The Blaze, Breitbart’s Breitbart and Tuck-tuck’s Dailey Caller.
Tuck-tuck was very, very good at running his own media operation and quickly built up a much larger audience than he ever had on CNN or MSNBC. Surprisingly, his original marketing strategy was actually to talk up the need for accurate reporting and good journalism. At his CPAC speech he even told the wingnuts they should learn from the NYT “because the NYT at least cares about accuracy”).
Of course, mostly what he did was rely on his extensive celebrity connections to GOP insiders to purvey stunts and gimmicks and fabricate fake stories. Here’s a good article in CJR from 2011, it even quotes some rando names Markos. I recommend you read up on this because it will help remind you that Tucker Carlson was a relatively important media operator and manipulator before his gig at Fox. He was employing Ginni Thomas. He’s the guy behind the fake “Journ-o-list Scandal” that got several mainstream reporters fired from their jobs. He paid some prostitutes to lie about an affair with Senator Bob Menendez.
When he got hired at Fox, he had been something of a thorn in their side for years. They were willing to give him control over the content and format of his show because he knew that audience better than any of them. And he did, too, because with him in charge that show quickly became the #1 cable show and he became one of the most hated figures in the US.
Having let him go, they’re not simply going to be able to ‘just replace him with Jesse Watters’. Likewise, he’s not going to have a problem going back to running his own successful media enterprise that is a thorn in the side of Fox.
Unless he personally gets sued for 1.6 billion dollars, of course.
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