They might get dizzy.
I finally figured out who Tucker Carlson reminds me of when he talks. The Encyclopedia Britannica kid from the late 80s/early 90s: 1990 - ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA COMMERCIAL with ANNOYING KID - YouTube
Listen to that, then any Carlson monologue.
(Apparently even the youtu.be trick no longer works for putting a video in a post.)
In other words, “Après moi, le déluge”.
It’s the ancient motto of the elite.
I was recently reading Lincoln’s inauguration speech. The South had already begun the process of seceding, because of the (supposed) threat of losing slavery.
He starts by saying, “I was elected saying that I would respect the Constitution and all the laws that guarantee the right to slavery. You can look through every speech that I have ever given, every telling of every discussion that I’ve ever been in, and it will all say the same thing: I’m not here to fight slavery. I’m going to maintain the current standard, exactly as it is. And if you’re looking at all of that, at every word I’ve ever said, every promise that I’ve ever made, and the people who elected me - knowing what I promised - then your fear is crazy and you’re just making yourself upset over imagined things.”
And while true that Lincoln did eventually end slavery, I don’t really see any reason to think that he would have had it not been for the war and all of the imagined things. If those in the South had simply read what he said, looked at the evidence, and not imagined that something else had been said, they wouldn’t have gone on to destroy everything that they hoped for. (To be sure, in that case, it was good that they did, but it remains that they screwed themselves over by it.)
I don’t have any reason to think that people are worse at accepting that someone is saying what they’re saying these days, than they were in past times, but I’m reasonably certain that you should always make note of the times where what you saw and heard was patently different from what was actually said. It’s a bad habit.
How unfortunate for them - they’ll have to find another useful idiot to spout their venom.
I’m not sure if it’s been posted yet, but the Lincoln Project gave Tucker a send off
According to the New York Times, the final straw was Fox’s discovery in Tucker’s texts that, and I hope you’re sitting down for this, he might be just be a wee bit racist.
That part actually makes sense, if one subscribes to a bit of a cynical worldview.
It’s one thing to play a villain on TV to make money. Like pro-wrestling, the character can be adjusted, there can be redemptive arcs, heel turns, sudden revelations, Vince McMahon showing up out of nowhere, etc. Whatever keeps the flow of money from gullible rubes coming.
But, to mix metaphors, it’s another thing if he was getting high on his own supply.
I think that there was going to be a steady drip of some pretty awful Carson communication that would come out in a trial and the Murdochs decided to cut their losses. Their audience is old, unhealthy and not being replaced. At some point, the company knows it has to find a new audience and try to modify its reputation. I think a few more talking heads will roll and the network will spend a couple years trying to reinvent itself.
I don’t know how I feel about these leaked texts and videos that are coming out now about Tucker.
IMO, most of them are actually more benign that the sewage he came out with on his actual show. (e.g. calling his viewers “post-menopausal”…so what, it’s largely accurate about his median female viewer).
And I don’t like that FOX (who has known all of this stuff all along) is choosing to leak it now, to again attempt to manipulate their viewers.
I feel fine about the leaks. Carlson deserves it.
So what was worse in their minds; the racism in “It’s not how white men fight” or the empathy in “Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?”
If that’s at me, iiandyiiii then I think you misunderstand what I’m saying.
Tucker can go straight to hell, without passing Go. He’s one of the last people on earth I would have sympathy for. Fk him.
The leaks though, is a manipulative media channel that knowingly utilized this scumbag for years, and is attempting to play their viewers once again.
So my only exposure to FOX news is typically when I sit in the waiting room of a local jail (for work purposes).
The other day I arrived and sat, waiting to go visit an inmate, when I realized that the channel wasn’t tuned to FOX. The guards had apparently navigated to Newsmax.
It was dreadful seeing the snippets of FOX (every story led to a reporter wondering “does this mean that Joe Biden doesn’t know what’s going on?”)
But Newsmax is almost a parody of right wing news, it’s so over the top.
However, apparently FOX is now persona non grata, and I have to believe that letting Tucker go ruined their reputation amongst much of the faithful. Indeed, one of the lead stories on the Newsmax show was “Is FOX the new CNN?” (The underlying point, for those who don’t jive with this nonsense, is that FOX is now a commie liberal rag).
Now I’ll readily agree with your first two points, but the third is IMO absolutely insanely false.
Their audience is being actively recruited to and bolstered on a daily basis. Further, people keep getting older every day. They are creating Raging Rabid Rightists out of mild conservatives. And creating mild conservatives out of centrists. And by continuously dragging the Overton Window to the right, they are building new generations of young people steeped in a place with a very, very different hard-right reality than we grew up with.
As @iiandyiiii said, and @Moriarty almost said, just above this isn’t Fox tacking to the center having recognized the error of their ways. This is Fox resetting for another run at full on crazy with a different talking head to the fore.
My IMO bottom line: Fox doesn’t find their audience; they make their audience. Their factory is doing fine, and any pause now is just them retooling for the next model year. Whatever they make next, we can be sure it’ll still be unsafe for democracy at any speed.
Nope, Fox viewers are old and white, while America is diversifying. Further, the market for fascist friendly programming is more robust than it used to be. Older viewers are dropping dead and newer fascists are finding other media outlets.
If Fox wants to be more than a niche broadcaster, they are going to have to find a broader audience than angry old racists. The lawsuit gives them an opening to retool, they’ll take a ratings hit (like what is happening now) but they can pivot to a less overt form of fascism. They’ve been talking about the need to do that for years, then came Trump.
From the Wikipedia page for Fox News
As indicated by a New York Times article, based on Nielsen statistics, Fox appears to have a mostly aged demographic.[96] In 2008, in the 25–54 age group, Fox News had an average of 557,000 viewers, but dropped to 379,000 in 2013 while increasing its overall audience from 1.89 million in 2010 to 2.02 million in 2013. The median age of a prime-time viewer was 68 as of 2015.[97] A 2019 Pew Research Center survey showed that among those who named Fox News as their main source for political news, 69% are aged 50 or older.[98]
As I’ve posted elsewhere on the SD …
“We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” --Republican Senator Lindsey Graham
I think that underpins the basic strategy that we’ve been seeing since (at least) 2015.
What worked in the 60’s (the “Southern Strategy,” a/k/a Recruit the Racists) is just warmed over. It’s now some heady brew of “Dig up the deplorables” and “Bring out the gimp.”
Very “Deliverance” feel to it, overall.
I recently saw an interview with Frank Luntz where he said – demographically – that Republican voters do skew much older. In his words, “the average Republican voter is dead.”
I assume the leaks are from the Murdochs and that they are cherry picking quotes thaT make Carlson look bad, while making Fox look like they were shocked that a fascist was among them.
The median age of a Fox News viewer in prime time is anywhere from 65-68 over the past decade (it varies from year to year but stays in that range).
It has also faced a steep decline in viewers the last couple of years, but CNN and MSNBC are the same. People just aren’t watching any cable news as much as they did. It’s a slowly dying medium. People are turning to things like web sites and podcasts.
Fox News still rules over its competitors, but they’re all losing. They aren’t generating more viewers. That is not backed up by any statistics I can find.