Gatekeeping the Open Range
tucker carlson will never be heard from again, obvo
Several decades ago I walked up the side of a mountain to a very large observatory that had giant telescopes at high altitude, planning to spend a few hours there before hiking back down. But the gate was closed. I hiked twelve miles uphill to an obstacle. An employee at the gate explained that the observatory was only open to scheduled tour groups that day, and he wasn’t allowed to let me through the gate unless I had a ticket as a member of one of those groups. As I turned to walk away, he said, “And I absolutely didn’t tell you that the fence ends fifty feet into the woods, right over there.”
So Tucker Carlson has been fired, the same week that the Democratic National Committee announced that they won’t conduct presidential debates during the 2024 primaries — and two months after Project Veritas fired James O’Keefe. The rough edges are being smoothed out; the public sphere is being calmed and homogenized. They’re putting guardrails on the discourse to protect our democracy.
However. The Writer’s Guild of America is getting thisclose to going on strike, with negotiations continuing but members having already voted to authorize the thing, and the thing that’s at stake in the negotiations is the thing that makes all of this political gatekeeping so pointless: the decline of broadcast, and the matching rise of streaming, with shorter seasons and lower pay for writers. There are over 500 television shows, now, up from about 200 ten to fifteen years ago. Television content is exploding, and your computer is a television, and almost everything with a .com at the end is effectively a TV network, or aspiring to become one.
So Fox News fired somebody. Okay.
The Wall Street Journal claims to have inside information that puts Tucker Carlson’s contract with the Murdoch empire at about $20 million a year, and maybe that’s even true. Compare the math if the Tucker Carlson Network — .com — starts streaming with two million subscribers at $50 each per year. Cf. Glenn Beck, but probably with a wider reach. Apparently even Keith Olbermann is still streaming or podcasting or something, and listening to Keith Olbermann is like punching holes in your skull with power tools.
It’s not 1974. TBD, but I doubt very much that anyone has been silenced, and I suspect the culture warriors dancing around and cheering because they got a scalp today don’t actually understand the way the next steps play out.
The guardrails are going up, but the fence ends a few feet into the woods.
Larry Correia, elsewhere:
I am seeing a lot of people not really understanding today’s events in cable news. Ha ha. Tucker Carlson is such a loser. Big dummy got fired!
That shows a very boomer era understanding of media consumption and overestimation of the power of a traditional news channel.
He didn’t need Fox. The last I saw his contract there was something like cheap, which is chump change to a guy with a reliable audience in the millions every night.
Tucker Carlson is now going to go sign a Joe Rogan size contract on a streaming service. He will make the most money of any news broadcaster in history and probdbly do so by an insane margin.
Meanwhile Don Lemon is a relative non entity. He won’t bring much of an audience with him wherever he goes.
One of these two will get a pay cut. The other is going to make orders of magnitude more money, and has the investment potential to boost any media corporation he signs with into a very competitive sphere.
And I don’t even watch Fox News at all, nor do I care about Tucker Carlson. But if you are too blinded by goofy partisan point scoring to grasp the business implications of this, it’s a bad look, but it ain’t my problem.
https://www.facebook.com/larry.correia/posts/pfbid029UUXAm4DDMiGBVxeYgi4MiKTWKHgtrUg32niBjfAyrEzZbh5vVj9zcXoifRm6hvFl
(EDITED to fix borked link.)
Thank you. I've been depressed all day. I know it's stupid, but Tucker Carlson was the first news show I ever watched because, while I did disagree with him from time to time, he was the first conservative I came across that did not lick the boots of the Republican Party, corporations, and the war machine, and he identified the same fundamental problems I did. Granted, I had been living in a Democrat bubble for a while, but, god, he was so refreshing. He seemed sincere.
And Ryan Gardner on here has it right. He calls it the "suits"; I call it the Machine. But he was giving voice to a truth many of us peons have understood for a while now. R or D, there ain't any difference. They all see us as obstacles or resources, but feel no compunction to treat us as individuals worthy of their time and attention.
But the fence on that particular gate doesn't even go a few feet into the woods. It's a wide open field thanks to platforms like Substack and Rumble and the like, and all you have to do is step two feet to the side and you'll be by it. And the only ones who don't understand that quite yet are those who actually think getting Tucker off cable will save them.