Fox’s Reckoning

A post-Tucker Carlson crisis.

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A person walks past the Fox News headquarters in New York City on March 9, 2023. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)

No one is above accountability, we at The Dispatch believe, and that includes us.

In that spirit, I hold myself accountable. I was wrong.

On the day Fox News parted ways with Tucker Carlson, I doubted that the network would suffer much, if at all, in the 8 p.m. hour. “For all the hype about Carlson’s ratings, the truth is that any dogmatic right-wing figure airing at 8 p.m. on Fox News will attract an enormous audience,” I wrote. “It’s conceivable that Carlson’s replacement will even improve on his numbers by luring back a few traditionally conservative viewers who may have been put off by Tucker’s New Right approach. Slide Ben Shapiro into that hour and Fox won’t miss a beat.”

That is … not what the ratings at 8 p.m. have shown in the two weeks since his departure.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    Why do you always assume the worst? I don’t think this is the most likely scenario. Besides, two weeks is two short a time to call it on the question of whether Fox could slot Ben Shapiro in at 8pm and do just fine. Of course they’ll take a big hit in the short term. Wait a year or two.

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  2. Avatar photo
    Mister D

    The door remains open for a sane, credible, right-of-center news channel. Anyone listening?

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    Soniak21

    The problem with TuckerTV—if by that you mean some kind of streaming product—is that Fox News viewers are old. At least that's my knee-jerk, stereotype-based reaction... and maybe it's wrong. But my initial take is that older folks want a regular TV show that they can click to on their regular TVs at the same time every day, and mostly won't follow Tucker to some newfangled streaming option that you have to hunt for online.

    Well, I'll amend that: the fanatics will follow him. Probably even the elderly fanatics. If they're true Tucker junkies, they'll find a way to follow him. But the rank-and-file Fox viewer—the older, Right-leaning guy or gal who used to tune in for a reliable dose of ideologically friendly content each night—probably won't make the effort.

    So if Tucker has an audience in streaming content, it's smaller and even more radical. If you think of conspiratorial Right-wing populism as porn (and it's not the *worst* analogy) this will be the turn from soft-core to hard-core.

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  4. John

    Fox has always been a right wing propaganda machine with a little bit of real news mixed in. I recall ORielly saying Obama was an out of control reckless spender and he doubled the deficit. It’s total bullsh!t. No solid data behind it. Also Fox repeating trumps claims concerning his enormous level of jobs created while ignoring that this index was inherited from Obama. It’s never been honest. But Carlson added a level of anti American hate and conspiracy theories. The problem here is his audience. How could anyone not recognize this? Fox will be fine and right wing as always. Hope they use this as a course correction going forward and clean up their mess, at least a bit.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

      It's all in the definitions. Deficit as a percent of GDP? Deficit in terms of gross dollar amounts? It isn't until you define the terms that a person can judge their accuracy.

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      1. John

        Agree. But that’s not what I’m saying These guys are liars and the lies were constructed by Fox. You can express it any way you want but these were intentional lies

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  5. Richard Kropas

    TC's Twitter message yesterday was rife with hypocrisy. He goes on and on about telling the real truths but this is the same guy who personally knew the Trump election fraud was nonsense but feared losing his audience to Newsmax. What is wrong with the Maga conservative wing of today?

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      Mister D

      Much of today's MAGA wing is the old Buchanan and Perot wing and their descendants. What is wrong with them is what has always been wrong with them IMO. The problem is a large chunk of the saner corner of the right has left the party, and like slowly evaporating salt water, what remains is less palatable than ever.

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  6. Richard Kropas

    A similar media downfall has happened before: Walter Winchell spent his final two years as a recluse at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
    Winchell died of prostate cancer at the age of 74 on February 20, 1972, in Los Angeles, California. He is buried at Greenwood/Memory Lawn Mortuary & Cemetery in Phoenix. Larry King, who replaced Winchell at the Miami Herald, recalled:
    He was so sad. You know what Winchell was doing at the end? Typing out mimeographed sheets with his column, handing them out on the corner. That's how sad he got. When he died, only one person came to his funeral: his daughter.

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  7. Nemmerle924

    It's early yet.

    Carlson's show re-entering the market on Twitter is untested. For all the squawking and screaming, Twitter is still a small universe compared to homes with TVs tuned to cable news at 8pm. Let's see how this goes before we start declaring Fox rocked completely by body-blows.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

      He had 20 million views of his twitter announcement, and less than 4 million viewers.

      It's too early to see, but I suspect he has a chance at building an audience there.

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      1. William Brady

        Twitter is not real life.

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        1. Avatar photo
          Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

          That may be true, but a ton more people follow it than cable.

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  8. Belisarius.Aves

    Nick - take a breath. Two weeks. Maybe a little less hot takes and more research? Now maybe you are right. A LOT has changed in six years but for a guy who wanted to move beyond hot takes, this is one. And sorry but Kilmeade and Jones are not Carlson, who needed time to rebuild. I would also argue that Hannity was FAR more dynamic than today, he almost seems lethargic. If Fox has a problem, it is a shallow bench.

    "In the first quarter of 2017 — his last full quarter on air — O’Reilly averaged more than 4 million viewers overall and 740,000 in the key demo. In the first quarter of 2018, his successor, Tucker Carlson, averaged just under 3 million viewers daily, and just over 600,000 viewers in the demo — down from the last two years but beating O’Reilly’s numbers for Q1 of the pre-Trump era 2013, 2014 and 2015.

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  9. Joe

    Of course Tucker is bigger than Fox. I called it in the comments section in your post about his firing! Fox Nation is nothing without Tucker's shows. Like him or not Tucker Carlson Today was a great interview show, and his Originals were okay. The anchor over there now is, I suppose, new episodes of Cops. It's a garbage platform with terrible content that was held together entirely by Tucker Carlson. I'm among the many who have cancelled my subscription.

    Fox's leak campaign is so bad that it almost looks like Tucker's releasing this stuff himself. The brand is dead. At a time when alternative outlets, Daily Wire first and foremost in my opinion, compete for ears and eyeballs Fox News tossed away the one guy who held their business together.

    The most interesting wrinkle to all of this, to me, is Tucker to Twitter. Rumble shareholders are in shambles but that's fine. Their streaming platform is not what makes them a worthwhile investment. If anything, their ritual of overpaying for creators to go "exclusive" with them is bad capital allocation. Their potential lies in rolling out the planned cloud and advertising services. If they can figure out that the streaming platform will always be window dressing and focus on what would be the core of a behemoth then that company can make it in a big way. Even if they just serve the right wing media ecosystem, that's a lot of cloud computing and a lot of ads.

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    1. Avatar photo
      George.Skinner

      I'm not sure Fox Nation is anything *with* Tucker Carlson either. All cable networks have been failing in their attempts to build paid internet services. Fundamentally, the people who watch cable news are a different demographic than the ones who primarily interact with the internet.

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      1. Joe

        Yeah, the "Boomers" (those who watch cable news) are split between Newsmax and Fox Loyalists. A lot of young people who watched Fox or who subscribed to Fox Nation cancelled over the firing of Dan Bongino and Tucker Carlson. Fox Nation was really Tucker Carlson and a bunch of garbage. Tucker Carlson derided the content as "Lifetime movies". I watched part of their Hatfields vs McCoys miniseries and it was like a really bad TLC reality show. There really isn't a lot going on there. Fox Nation had 1.5 million subscribers per a June 2022 Politico story. Fox Nation was "thriving" while CNN+ failed, and the only reason it thrived was Tucker.

        Keep an eye on Daily Wire.

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        1. Fudrock

          Hooray. Another trash outlet goes to the dump.

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          1. Joe

            The worst outlets have the most influence. See the NY Times and the Washington Post for examples. I suggest you check out Ann Coulter's May 10 Substack for another story on stuff that actually manages to be worse for our country than Trump tantrums.

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  10. Grafakos

    Maybe just show a movie at 8pm. If it were something like The Big Lebowski, even I might tune in.

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