Tucker Carlson guests like Glenn Greenwald, Gays Against Groomers, and Andy Ngo are melting down about his exit because it threatens to push them further into the margins.
— Michael Edison Hayden (@MichaelEHayden) April 24, 2023
Carlson and his producers gave a lot of airtime to cranks and they lost today too.
But I think Fox's audience will just get crazier.
Carlson's embrace of the great replacement theory, trans-bashing, and Hungarian-style Christianist illiberalism (not to mention the Putin line on Ukraine) might have been the only thing keeping a lot of right-wingers in the Fox News tent. Previous Fox firings -- Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck -- didn't lead to mass audience defections. But this time might be different. A significant sliver of the Fox audience drifted away after Fox called Arizona for Joe Biden in 2020; these folks came back only because Fox embraced election denialism and then led crusades against critical race theory, trans people, and "wokeness," with Carlson as the principal crusader. We know that the right is so enraged these days that even favorite brands are at risk -- I had doubts about the potency of the Bud Light boycott, but industry data says that sales fell 17% the week of April 15 -- so why couldn't Fox be at risk, too? (If Bud Light wants those customers back, it should probably hire Carlson as a spokesman.)
What I'm detecting these days is a higher-than-usual level of paranoia on the right, which manifests itself in the belief that anyone -- except Donald Trump, for some reason -- could be a hidden agent of the Deep State. It's remarkable, for instance, how many people seem willing to parrot Trumpist arguments that Ron DeSantis -- Ron DeSantis! -- is an agent of The Enemy (in bed, it is believed, with traitors Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, and, yes, Fox News).
And now:
Fox News meet Bud Lite
— LTG (R) Mike Flynn (@GenFlynn) April 24, 2023
Bud lite meet Fox News
Have a nice day!
— Francis White (@whit1736) April 24, 2023
If viewers leave Fox, where will they go? Back to Newsmax and One America News, presumably -- but also to podcasts that can be even more bigoted, conspiratorialist, and eliminationist than Carlson's show. I agree with The Atlantic's David Graham and The New Republic's Michael Tomasky that, in the long run, Fox will get worse, but some of the media alternatives to Fox (Infowars, Steve Bannon's podcast, the Daily Wire universe) are, in many ways, already worse.
An audience that's primed to believe that the Murdoch family is "woke" is ready to believe all sorts of preposterous things. I'm afraid that audience will find what it wants in corners of the media that are even more brain-rotting than Fox.
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