Fox News firing Tucker Carlson turns into a bigger mistake by the day.
Carlson is going to end up with the last laugh.
Tucker Carlson struck back at Fox News in the one way that will hurt the most.
Carlson’s ouster from Fox News was the first domino to fall in a sea change in the conservative media landscape.
Just weeks after Fox News yanked Carlson off the air Carlson announced he was bringing his show back as a livestream exclusive on Twitter.
We’re back. pic.twitter.com/sG5t9gr60O
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) May 9, 2023
What stood out was the fact that Carlson’s tweet generated 133 million views, about 45 times the size of the audience Carlson attracted on a nightly basis.
The Daily Wire – started by Ben Shapiro and home to his popular show – announced Twitter would host all of the platform’s podcasts.
Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing explained that new Twitter owner Elon Musk’s stated commitment to free speech made Twitter the ideal home for their content.
“At this moment, Twitter is the largest free speech platform in the world,” Boreing stated.
“If Elon Musk stands by his commitment to make Twitter a home for free speech and delivers on monetization opportunities and more sophisticated analytics for content creators, I imagine we will invest even more into the platform,” Boreing continued.
But the biggest sign that the center of gravity in conservative media is shifting away from Fox News and towards Twitter is the fact that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his campaign on Twitter Spaces with Musk.
The campaign launch turned into a debacle as Twitter’s servers could not handle the demand for users to attend the event.
But that did not change the fact that Ron DeSantis is one of two frontrunners for the GOP presidential nomination and DeSantis judged that Twitter was the best platform to reach Republicans likely to vote in the primary.
Tucker Carlson explained the desire of conservatives like himself, Ben Shapiro, and Ron DeSantis gravitating towards Twitter as a function of the frustration felt by everyday Americans at the corporate media – which includes Fox News – censoring the news to keep information damaging the elite’s preferred narrative from reaching the public.
“The old system is collapsing,” Carlson told Axios. “You can’t claim you’ve got a democracy if all the information voters receive before a presidential election has been curated by the people already in charge.”
Fox News thought it could survive firing Tucker Carlson because the Fox News brand was the star.
But in today’s diffused media environment where the traditional gatekeepers no longer own a monopoly on the flow of information, Americans are consuming media from sources whose individual brands they trust.
And that is leading conservatives away from Fox News and towards Twitter where they can pick and choose the trusted individuals to deliver them the news.
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