S.T. Karnick is a senior fellow and director of publications for The Heartland Institute, where he edits Heartland Daily News and writes the Life, Liberty, Property e-newsletter.
The most-discussed news of the past week has been the cancelation of a television show that regularly drew an audience encompassing one one-hundredth of the nation’s population.
The abrupt end of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News is much more than gossip fodder. It reflects a fundamental and accelerating change in the TV news business.
The cancelation of Carlson’s show makes sense if the company is trying to reposition Fox News, just as several other companies are attempting to do, as the news media environment is rapidly changing.
Carlson is far from the only media figure or entity to become news fodder lately. CNN fired Don Lemon, a controversial figure and obvious loose cannon. Chris Cuomo was let go from CNN for political excesses and has rebranded himself as an objective journalist at News Nation. The hard-left media-news site BuzzFeed closed down altogether.
Straight news, by contrast, is a growth industry. News Nation is the fastest growing cable news network—though starting from zero makes that easier to accomplish. The Scripps News Channel, which formerly bore the far less genteel name of Newsy, announced it is expanding its daily roster of live news broadcasts.
These channels position themselves as objective and unbiased. News Nation bills itself as “America’s source for engaging and unbiased news, which reflects the full range of perspectives across the country.” Scripps News describes itself as “your source for concise, unbiased video news and analysis covering the top stories from around the world. With persistent curiosity and no agenda, we strive to fuel meaningful conversations by highlighting multiple sides of every story.”
All of this reflects a transition in major media organizations away from openly opinion-heavy coverage with a clear political position, toward operations that claim to offer a more objective and news-oriented approach. (Whether that claim is accurate may go a long way in determining their success.) These companies are fighting to position themselves as the sensible center in TV news.
Carlson’s program bucked this trend, diving heavily into conspiracy theories, speculation about extraterrestrial alien visitations, and similar arcana. It was rapidly becoming much more like the type of programming offered on podcasts and other alternative viewing modes, where figures such as Joe Rogan, Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Megyn Kelly take the infotainment element of TV news channels to the next level. The hosts and guests sift through the news, replay, and reply, offering the audience a way through the barrage of information that arrives daily in their web browsers and inboxes. That is precisely where Carlson was going.
It is instructive that right-of-center personalities have gravitated toward these new media, as their message increasingly differs from the woke agenda major corporations are embracing. Podcasts are becoming the new talk radio.
Carlson could easily develop a large following at an online forum and could even increase his audience beyond what it was at Fox News. A video Carlson posted online last Wednesday garnered more than 57 million views in the first 24 hours after it was released. Carlson could become the expanding new medium’s Rush Limbaugh.
Moving to the podcast world makes great sense for Carlson.
The separation could also work well for Fox News. Repositioning itself as a news outlet with some opinion programs, rather than an opinion channel with news coverage, would enable the company to move into the long-vacated space other, much smaller organizations are now trying to occupy. Fox News gets more money, by far, from monthly cable fees than any of its competitors, which gives the company an advantage in the competition to master the new environment.
Last week’s news-grabbing programming change might be just what the TV doctor ordered, moving the channel’s image at least a little way toward the middle of the political spectrum. Although Fox News’ primetime ratings have fallen drastically in the wake of the cancelation of Tucker Carlson Tonight, with the 8:00 p.m. audience dropping from about 3.3 million people per night to 1.15 million last Friday, the network has recovered from high-profile departures before.
There’s one big problem remaining for Fox News, however: It is chasing a rapidly shrinking customer base. The number of subscribers to cable and satellite television services fell by 26.5 percent over the past decade, and the out-migration is accelerating. Currently, more than half of all U.S. households do not subscribe to pay TV.
Perhaps Fox has done Tucker Carlson a big favor. Whether the cancelation will also work out for Fox News depends on whether people who did not like Carlson will decide that they might like Fox News without him.
In that competition, I would bet on Carlson.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member