With cable news figures, it’s often hard to tell where the commentator’s personal brand stops and the network’s influence 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.”
