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…
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