A couple of weeks ago, Fox News ousted Tucker Carlson, stripping the populist pundit of the most influential perch in the right-wing media world. In an announcement on Tuesday he shared that he's planning to revive his show, but not on another network. Instead, he said he was going to run his show on Twitter.
There are a number of questions swirling around Carlson’s announced enterprise, including whether he could be violating a noncompete provision in his contract with Fox News. But what we do know is that Carlson is contemplating embarking on a risky broadcast experiment and is eyeing Twitter as a uniquely hospitable place to broadcast his extreme right-wing propaganda. That speaks both to his desperation to remain relevant and Twitter’s ongoing evolution into a right-wing political scene.
Just like Carlson’s ouster from Fox News, his announcement that he’d be broadcasting on Twitter instead of heading to a conventional right-wing media outlet was a shock, for many reasons. For one thing, it's unclear whether the entire arrangement is workable. Twitter offers a paid subscription feature, which allows users to charge followers a monthly rate for exclusive content and, according to CEO Elon Musk, will also give creators a cut of advertising revenue in the future. But it’s a niche feature that hasn’t gotten a lot of traction; I’d venture that most Twitter users don’t even know it exists, much less Carlson’s core demographic. (It is, in fact, a reboot of a program that failed miserably in the pre-Musk era.)
Carlson is making a high-profile gamble in his bid to avoid the curse of the muted ex-Fox pundit.
Carlson’s announcement that he wants to run a show that would presumably be monetized through this subscription service is unprecedented — no media commentator of his stature and follower size has tried to run a professional operation native to Twitter. Musk says that he hasn’t struck any special deal with Carlson and that he would be subject to the standard rules and revenue agreements. Without any known investment or special revenue sharing deal from Twitter, it’s a particularly bold move by Carlson, because it’s a relatively untested feature.
Carlson appears to be making a high-profile gamble to avoid the curse of the muted ex-Fox pundit. Many previously ousted Fox News pundits, such as Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, have gone independent after having left the network to monetize their followings. They've been able to make money through their own websites and independent syndication efforts, but their impact on the daily conversation quickly faded.
Carlson will face structural obstacles. He would be able to post long videos — Musk allows Twitter Blue subscribers to post hourlong videos — but it’s unclear how well those would fare on a platform that thrives on snappy one-liners and 30-second video takedowns. It’s also unclear what percentage of his millions of nightly viewers would be willing to log on to Twitter to follow him if their medium of choice in the evenings is cable news television.
But that isn’t to say Carlson’s gamble is necessarily foolish. Under Musk’s stewardship, Twitter has become a more attractive platform for right-wing commentators and activists. Among other things, they like his hands-off content moderation style and his shutdown of the old verification badge system, which has turned off many left-leaning users and enables misinformation to flow more freely.
And despite all the tumult at Twitter since Musk’s takeover, there is still no other platform that comes even close in terms of its ability to break news and drive the conversation in American political discourse. Carlson most likely sees opportunity in all this. Setting up an operation on Twitter could be an effective way for him to rapidly expand an organic following online and generate social media firestorms. And it could be a way for him to remain in the fray of mainstream discourse that other Fox exiles, like O’Reilly and Beck, haven’t been able to achieve.
Carlson could also see Musk’s free speech rhetoric — specious as it is — as a way to turbocharge his pitch that his new show will be a place where he’s finally free from the shackles of his corporate overlords and will offer unfiltered truth to his viewers. (He described Twitter as the “only” big platform that allows for “free speech” in his announcement video, and decried the meddling of “gatekeepers” at professional media outlets.)
“The best you can hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to tell the fullest truth that you can,” Carlson said in his announcement video. “But there are always limits. And you know that if you bump up against those limits often enough you will be fired for it.”
Carlson is sending out a clear signal: If you thought his ideas were noxious before, they’re likely to get a lot worse on his Twitter show. Apparently floating ideas like the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory or convincing people Jan. 6 was an inside job was Tame Tucker. We might be about to get a taste of what he really thinks when he isn’t being held back by those weak-kneed moderates at Fox News. And he’s calculating that Musk’s Twitter is unlikely to do anything to stand in his way.
There are some big legal questions surrounding Carlson’s endeavor. Carlson has been in negotiations with Fox News about the financial terms of his exit, because his contract runs until 2025, and, according to Axios, Fox News wanted to pay him until then to prevent him from starting a competing show. But ahead of Carlson’s bombshell Twitter announcement, his lawyers sent a letter to Fox News saying that it had violated its contract with Carlson and that he was thus free from any noncompete provisions. It is possible that Fox News could seek an injunction to prevent him from posting videos.
Carlson has yet to reveal specific details about what his show would be like or when it would launch, other than “soon,” perhaps in part because of the ongoing legal questions. But it looks like he’s hungry to get back into the thick of things as quickly as possible. And it speaks to its extraordinary transformation over the past year that he’s wagering that Twitter is the best place to do it.