Fox News tried to play hardball with Tucker Carlson.
That blew up in management’s faces.
And Tucker Carlson hit Fox News with one nasty surprise that will change everything.
Fox News took Tucker Carlson off the air and tried to keep him on ice by paying out the remaining 20 months and 25 million dollars remaining on his contract.
But Carlson had other plans.
Carlson argued Fox News breached his contract by leaking text messages to The New York Times and announced he was bringing his show back as a Twitter exclusive.
Tucker made good on that promise by posting the debut episode of “Tucker on Twitter.”
And it was an even bigger smash hit than his Fox News show.
The biggest audience Carlson ever drew on cable was over 5 million viewers during the height of the 2020 election.
Carlson’s audience outdrew the NBA Finals – which featured megastar LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers – and was far and away number one on cable news.
But on Twitter the video of Carlson’s 10-minute monologue rang up nearly 90 million views.
Ep. 1 pic.twitter.com/O7CdPjF830
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 6, 2023
An audience 16 times what Carlson drew at the peak of his powers on Fox News saw Carlson tear into the propaganda the corporate media tried to pass off as news about Joe Biden’s war in Ukraine.
Carlson rattled off a series of stories – like the Ukraine war – that the media ignored the truth on because it did not fit the left’s preferred narrative.
These included questions about Jeffrey Epstein’s death and the source of his wealth, who organized the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, the assassination of President Kennedy, and where more than $130 billion in U.S. taxpayer money went in Ukraine.
“But mostly they just ignore the stories that matter. What’s happened to the hundreds of billions of US dollars we’ve sent to Ukraine? No clue. Who organized those BLM riots three years ago? No one’s gotten to the bottom of that. What exactly happened on 9/11? Well, it’s still classified. How did Jeffrey Epstein make all that money? How did he die? How about JFK? And so endlessly on. Not only are the media not interested in any of this, they’re actively hostile to anybody who is. In journalism, curiosity is the gravest crime,” Carlson declared.
Carlson also revealed that asking these questions got him fired from Fox News.
“If you’re wondering why our country seems so dysfunctional, this is a big part of the reason. No one knows what’s happening. A small group of people control access to all relevant information. The rest of us are allowed to yap about racism all we want, but go ahead and talk about something that really matters and see what happens. If you keep it up, they’ll make you be quiet. Trust us. That’s how they maintain control,” Carlson concluded.
But if Fox News wanted to make Carlson irrelevant by keeping him off TV until 2025 management was sorely mistaken.
The changing media landscape and slow death of linear TV means social media and streaming offers pundits like Carlson the opportunity to reach an audience many times larger than Fox News.