You’re Delusional If You Think Tucker Carlson Will Be More Powerful Without Fox News

There is an emerging Ben Kenobi theory of Tucker Carlson’s firing from Fox News: that he will only become more powerful than the rest of us could possibly imagine.

Megyn Kelly, herself a Fox News alum who has touted her status as an independent voice in media, called the ouster from the most-watched network in all of cable news “a great thing” for Carlson.

“Fox needed Tucker way more than Tucker needed Fox,” asserted Glenn Greenwald, another corporate media critic who argued that “If he goes to an independent platform, his audience will be even bigger and his voice more influential.”

Both Kelly and Greenwald have found great success in their own independent media pursuits, so their opinions should come as no surprise. But the same sentiment was repeated by Carlson fans of all vocations.

Whatever he does, and wherever he does it, there’s little doubt that Carlson will be just fine. He will exit Fox News with a golden parachute encrusted with diamonds. Millions of Americans care about what he has to say and enjoy the way he says it. Moreover, many independent streamers and Substackers attract as many, if not more ears and eyes than the flagship shows of corporate media outfits. It won’t be hard for Carlson to monetize his massive audience such that his standard of living goes unaffected; he’s potentially entering a lucrative, influential business that comes with none of the strings or risks that working at the behemoths do.

But to argue that Carlson will be more influential as an independent voice a la Kelly or Greenwald fundamentally misunderstands the modern media landscape. With the benefits of going independent and leaving the coveted 8:00 p.m. slot at Fox comes some sacrifices. The most glaringly obvious one is influence.

In a solo capacity, Carlson may well see his raw audience grow. Yet he won’t be the kind of fixed presence in the national conversation he has been or enjoy the same kind of audience he had at Fox. From his perch at the biggest network in cable news, Carlson had what we might call the power-viewers tuning in: all manner of politicos — from journalists, to staffers, to governors, to presidents — watch cable news obsessively. Few are tuning into YouTube.

Even accounting for the quantitative increase in audience size that alternative media affords content producers, it comes nowhere close to having the qualitative influence of cable news, which still drives entire industries, from media to politics to business to tech.

As the face of Fox’s prime time programming, Carlson didn’t just lay claim to a couple of million viewers for an hour tonight, he was a perpetual part of the country’s political discourse. Clips of his show went viral on social media on a near-daily basis. He was the subject of numerous profiles — few of them flattering — that were nevertheless a testament to and extension of his impact. It’s been reported that Carlson’s skepticism of the Trump administration’s killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani dissuaded Trump from further aggressive action against the Iranian regime. And the host was known to have enjoyed access to the former president while he was in the White House.

The power of Carlson’s reach at Fox was perhaps never more apparent than just last month, when his solicitation of potential Republican presidential candidates’ views on the war in Ukraine not only elicited weeks of conversation, but seemed to compel Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to abandon his previously hawkish foreign policy outlook and mimic Carlson’s restrained one.

Of course there will still be those who still pay painstakingly close attention to Carlson’s next chapter. He no doubt has much more to say and what he does will have an effect. The daily agenda-setting of Tucker Carlson Tonight, however, will impossible to match.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.