The media world has grown in scale and complexity to such an extent the knowledge of how it can best be used to maximum advantage seems more and more open to the individual specialist.
Take Tucker Carlson as an example.
His loss to Fox News might not be as easily negated as the Murdoch family believes (or hopes), according to Victor Davis Hanson, because of the changes that have fragmented network news in the past decade.
Fox News’s daily hour-long program, Tucker Carlson Tonight, pulled in an average audience of 3.3 million viewers in its final two months, making it by far the most viewed cable news show in America.
Fox Corporation’s stock slumped by three percent when the news was announced it would be ending, with an estimated $800 million in value being wiped away, as Breitbart News reported.
All predicated on Tucker Carlson, the man who became Fox’s most popular personality after replacing Bill O’Reilly in Fox’s prime-time lineup in 2016.
A video posted by Tucker Carlson to his Twitter page beat his old Fox News Channel time slot within the first hour. https://t.co/qQbtAx6c3D
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) April 28, 2023
What happens now he’s left the building?
Hanson, author of The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, argues his audience has left with him and like others who have recently bailed on big news companies, “in terms of reach and profit they are far more successful” outside than in.
He told the London Daily Telegraph in an interview his thoughts on the future for both Carlson and Fox News:
I think that Tucker was supposedly getting two more years at $20 million a year, given his appeal and talents he could probably make more than that with his own venue.
That wasn’t true 20 years ago … wasn’t true five years ago … but we’ve so fragmented the media business you don’t have to go on TV […] that’s one of the messages the Murdochs are not quite understanding that when you take away somebody who had a greater potential elsewhere and was a precious asset that anchored your whole evening lineup and you fired him in a fit of pique, or anger, without thinking it through you’ve got to be very careful because you can’t replace a guy like that.
Hanson sees a world where a host of “other venues” from podcasts to YouTube interviews and Twitter segments eat away at the big network platforms and deliver Carlson an audience entirely of his own – and the commercial opportunities that come with that.
He cites Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro as examples of what is possible for the lone operator in terms of “reach and profit.”
Hanson concluded “a lot of people are very angry about it [Carlson’s firing]” and where there’s anger there’s likely to be action.