The Left may have won its battle to terrorize big-name advertisers out of sponsoring Tucker Carlson’s show, but the Fox News host and his 4 million viewers are winning the war. Carlson is now the most watched cable news host on television, and it isn’t close.
Carlson’s detractors have chalked up his success to what they view as racist dog-whistling for a conservative base that craves hate. His fans view him as uniquely representative of a more nationalist, populist strain of conservatism. But the truth is actually much simpler. Carlson is a fine pundit but an even better journalist. His secret is that unlike so many others, he does more than just pluck his stories from Twitter trends. He does original reporting. Throw in the fact that he’s an intellectually honest conservative, both aligned with President Trump’s strain of the movement and willing to criticize him, and it’s an obvious formula for success.
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Consider what happened after Ronan Farrow revealed that NBC News had likely shut down the journalist’s reporting into Harvey Weinstein in order to protect its own predatory prodigy, Matt Lauer. Other anchors responded to this news either by quickly covering Lauer’s denial or by running fairly generic interviews with Farrow, reiterating what was already news. Carlson instead tapped Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News star who was likely ousted from NBC for reporting on the Lauer allegations, to come on his show and call for NBC to allow an independent investigation into the network.
It was good television, but it was even better journalism. Kelly is ratings gold and a household name central to the Lauer story. The rest of the media were foolish for ignoring her.
Carlson may make headlines for his lengthy monologues excoriating liberals and the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. But the real bread and butter of his show is his original reporting. He sent shock waves through the Right with an investigation into conservative megadonor Paul Singer’s financial involvement with a Nebraska town that fell into financial ruin. He’s run excruciating segments exposing McKinsey & Company’s ties to China.
No matter how profound the analysis, people don’t really want an hour of conservative ranting. They want even more to hear about stories the rest of the media shy away from, and that’s where Carlson excels. While CNN whitewashes the anarchy of the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, Carlson chooses well respected local reporters to provide insight from the ground.
Carlson’s rebranding has become legend. The San Francisco-born son of a soup heiress, once a bow-tied Cato Institute fellow who toed the Bush-era party line at the Weekly Standard, has thoroughly rebranded himself as the nation’s leading populist. But it doesn’t matter much. So what if Carlson is as much a swamp monster as his Palisades neighbors? Unlike them, he’s an actual journalist — and just as much, he actually believes what he’s saying.
Perhaps most importantly, cable news is overwhelmingly bad. Jake Tapper runs a good straight news hour on CNN, as does Ari Melber on MSNBC. But outside of Fox, prime time has become a joke. Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon are Democratic propagandists pretending to be newsmen. Although Rachel Maddow is an excellent liberal commentator, she’s followed by fabulist Brian Williams, who shouldn’t have a job in the first place. While Carlson draws more than 4 million viewers, Anderson Cooper and Chris Hayes can’t get half that.
Activists can try and cancel Carlson all they want, but so long as his ratings remain through the roof, he’s a net asset to Fox and the news industry in general. And if I were a betting woman, I’d say we’re not yet at the apex of his influence.
