There is something sort of sad about the news, as announced Tuesday, that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson will relaunch his show on Twitter. Three weeks ago, Carlson was riding high as the biggest name on America’s most popular cable news network. Then, as far as anyone can tell, he lost his job for being a jerk. Now he is taking his show to a money-losing website that does not actually have shows and is owned by a terminally thirsty dweeb who is desperate to win the approval of opinion leaders such as @catturd2. “Starting soon, we’ll be bringing a new version of the show we’ve been doing for the last six and a half years to Twitter,” Carlson said on Tuesday in a video posted to the site. “But for now, we’re just grateful to be here.” This is sort of like claiming that you’re glad to be exiled to Siberia because you’ve always wanted to learn how to ski.
While Carlson might try to spin this move as an exciting and volitional one, the truth is that the host probably didn’t have all that many other options—and, according to the New York Times, his former employer could still try to enforce his current contract and keep him from relaunching his show. Carlson’s lucrative contract with Fox News included a noncompete agreement that would have kept him off the air until 2025. In order to get out of the noncompete, Carlson would certainly have to forgo a reported $25 million in salary. Although Carlson comes from money, even generationally wealthy people like to be paid what the market says they’re worth. There’s only so much of a salary haircut that anyone would agree to take before it starts to make more sense to just stay home and go fishing for a couple of years.
So, where else could Carlson have actually gone? While CNN, MSNBC, and the broadcast networks could have afforded to hire him, there would have been mass resignations there if they’d done so. (That said, it would not surprise me to hear that CNN’s Chris Licht, who’s very explicitly trying to get Republicans to watch the network again, might have kicked Carlson’s tires at some point over the past two weeks.) The second-tier conservative cable channels Newsmax and OANN would have gladly snapped Carlson up, but they are shoestring operations that may well end up being sued out of business by Dominion and Smartmatic by this time next year. And while other marginal outlets had voiced interest in hiring the host, I have to think that even Tucker Carlson has too much self-respect to announce that he’s taking his talents to Rumble.
But Twitter, I suppose, makes a certain amount of sense. Although Musk said Tuesday that Twitter had not inked any sort of deal with Carlson, the mogul is rich enough to meet Carlson’s price without thinking too hard about it—and he’s also grandiose enough to pitch Carlson hard on the upside of becoming Twitter’s star content creator. In the six months or so that Musk has helmed Twitter, he has been focused on constraining mainstream opinion leaders’ influence there, if not on driving them off the platform entirely. While popular wisdom holds that Musk has declared war on legacy blue checks because he is a troll and a jerk—and while he is, indeed, both of those things—I think he’s also making a play to refocus discourse on Twitter around the opinions and priorities of tech guys and right-wingers. If it’s a business move, it pencils out only in the sense that right-wing media is hugely profitable. But, more likely, Musk just can’t help it. This is a guy, after all, who mused that this past weekend’s mass shooting by an apparent neo-Nazi in Dallas was some kind of left-wing false flag.
If remaking Twitter into a nativist laundromat is Musk’s long-term play, then I can see why he’d welcome Carlson in the starring role. Both men, after all, love to disparage the mainstream media as tainted and untrustworthy while casting themselves as fearless free-speech champions. “Amazingly, as of tonight, there aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech,” said Carlson in his announcement video. “The last big one remaining in the world, the only one, is Twitter, where we are now.” Welcoming Carlson’s reconfigured show onto Twitter bolsters Musk’s self-bestowed free-speech credentials while further tweaking mainstream pundits, and perhaps driving even more of them off the platform. (That last part can’t actually be good for a site that had once convinced the entire media to post there, for free, at all hours, but hey, he’s the guy who paid $44 billion for the place.)
But aside from the money that Carlson presumably stands to make here in one way or another, and the joy that both he and Musk presumably take from riling erstwhile blue checks with further confirmation that Twitter is no longer their platform, it’s a bit harder to see how this move makes sense from an eyeballs-on-programming standpoint. For one thing, as I mentioned earlier, Twitter does not have shows. You don’t go to Best Buy to get a sandwich, and you don’t go to Twitter to watch the news. It’s a second screen, a watercooler. But even if Musk has ambitions of building Twitter into a multimedia platform that does host original content, good luck convincing Carlson’s Fox News audience to follow him there. Fox News appeals primarily to the sort of old, angry people who have to ask their adult children to show them how to use the remote control. While some of these people will surely figure out how to follow Carlson over to Twitter, my guess is that the host will now primarily be performing for the caviling nerds of Twitter Blue, whose interest in his show will be directly proportionate to the amount of time Carlson spends investigating why Steve Albini gets more engagement than they do. Carlson will make the best of it, I’m sure, but make no mistake: This move is a downgrade for the host, no matter how grateful he is that anyone is tuning in.
