After his surprise ouster from Fox News, Carlson’s plans for the future seemed up in the air until – boom – he showed up on Elon Musk-owned Twitter with an announcement that appeared to be filmed in his living room.
“Starting soon,” Carlson said, “we’ll be bringing a new version of the show we’ve been doing for the last 6 1/2 years.”
Not surprisingly, that wasn’t all Carlson said after his firing from Fox’s primetime slot. In the brief three-minute segment, he described a corporate newsroom in which the news you consume is true in the strictest sense. It is also a “lie” because some facts are withheld from you on purpose, he said.
“The rule of what you can’t say,” he said, “defines everything.”
Gary Bauer of American Values say Tucker’s nightly program really did fill a void that went unfilled even on right-leaning Fox News.
“He was bringing up the issues that our establishment in America does not want us to be able to debate,” Bauer tells AFN. “He was one of the last people to regularly do this since the death of Rush Limbaugh.”
Op-ed: Carlson reflects views of millions
Carlson, 53, has enjoyed a varied media career that included writing for The Weekly Standard and The Daily Caller, which he co-founded. He also served as host or co-host on political shows that aired on CNN, MSNBC, and PBS. His career at Fox News began in 2009 with guest appearances and then co-hosting Fox and Friends Weekend.
Carlson’s now-cancelled evening show began in 2016 with a huge opening-night audience, and he has dominated the Fox News lineup every since after Fox fired Bill O’Reilly in 2017.
Even though Democrats and far-left activists despise Fox News, and would probably outlaw the news network if they could, they have directed their hatred at Carlson in particular because of his topics and for the millions of eyeballs he attracted.
In a USA Today op-ed about Tucker’s show and his plans for Twitter, Inez Stepman of the Independent Women’s Forum said the “legacy media” mistakenly believes Tucker’s audience was under some type of “hypnotism” in which it repeated what he said on the show. The opposite, she wrote, is true.
“Few stop to consider,” Stepman wrote, “that the show was popular exactly because it gave a hearing to the views millions of Americans already held, and voice to a mistrust they already shared, of virtually every one of America’s elite institutions.”
Compare that view of normal Americans with an NBC News panel that shuddered at the idea Carlson will be free to speak his mind.
"Will anybody be able to police what Carlson says?" an NBC News anchor fretted. "Or is this the point? It's just a free-for-all?"
Twitter, in fact, could police Tucker's show organically with its "Community Notes" feature and with comments from Twitter users.
When a new political show drops on Twitter is unknown. Carlson is currently fighting a non-compete clause with Fox News.
