In early June 2020, Mr Carlson told his audience that the Black Lives Matter protests were “definitely not for the lives of blacks” and “remember that when they come for you”. The following evening, when Fox’s public relations team insisted that Mr Carlson’s comment was misrepresented, Mr Carlson bent down. “The crowd came for us – irony of irony,” he told Fox viewers. “They spent the last 24 hours trying to shut down the show forever. Fortunately, they will not succeed. We work for one of the last brave companies in America and they are not afraid.
Outside the camera, Mr. Carlson may be less challenging. In an interview in the spring with Eric Owens, one of his former employees at The Daily Caller, he worries that the controversy surrounding his show has made it difficult for his children to get jobs and internships; he worried that his younger children would not go to college. “It’s not right for my family to be affected and to literally affect my children’s future,” Mr Carlson said, according to Mr Owens.
But it’s less clear whether the attacks significantly affected Fox’s end result: To make up for lost advertising, Fox turned Tucker Carlson Tonight into a promotional engine for the network itself. He replaced the fleeing sponsors with a stream of internal promotions, using Mr. Carlson’s popularity to direct viewers to other, more advertiser-friendly offerings. By the beginning of 2019, approximately one-fifth of all advertising “impressions” in the show are from internal advertising, according to data from the analytical company iSpot.tv. This summer, when Fox rejected criticism of Mr Carlson’s “fraudulent” comments, the share rose to more than a third. (A Fox spokeswoman said the actual proportions were lower, but declined to give specific figures.) “Fox is actually a huge brand of loyalty,” said Jason Damata, CEO of Fabric Media, a media consulting firm. “He’s the hook.”
Other ad slots were occupied by brands aimed directly at consumers who were either not interested in Mr Carlson’s poor advertising or saw that they could use its intensity to sell their products. In January 2019, MyPillow, a Fox advertiser whose CEO Mike Lindell is the main promoter of Mr. Trump’s stolen election lie, began airing more than $ 1 million in Tucker Carlson Tonight ads each month. . Fox seems to be using MyPillow to reassure Mr Carlson: As the other ad dried up, the company’s ads increased. (By all accounts, by December 2021, Mr. Lindel had bought an advertisement that would have cost $ 91 million at announced prices; the discounts probably made that amount lower.)
Advertisers with blue chips will never return to the show that is in effect. But thanks in part to the large audience he could provide for those remaining advertisers and the premium prices that Fox could charge them, Mr. Carlson’s advertising revenue began to recover. Every year since 2018, Tucker Carlson Tonight brings in more annual Fox ad revenue than any other show, according to iSpot estimates. Last May, after promoting the theory of “replacing” white supremacy, Mr Carlson had half as many advertisers as in December 2018, but it brought in almost twice as much money.
As Tucker Carlson Tonight became more toxic to advertisers, it also began to include fewer guests who disagreed with the host and more guests who simply repeated or reinforced Mr. Carlson’s own message. Not only did the Liberals not want to discuss it, although some have now refused to appear on the show, as Mr Carlson complained during a Fox appearance last summer; Fox learned that the audience did not necessarily like to listen from the other side. “From my discussions with Fox News bookmakers, my conclusion is that they have decided that they are simply no longer making segments for debate,” said Richard Goodstein, a Democratic lobbyist and campaign adviser who appears regularly on the show. Mr Carlson by the summer of 2020. In much of the Fox group, former officials said, producers are relying more and more on panels by conservative, pro-Trump, who are vying to see who could condemn Democrats more zealously. a rating gambit that a former Fox employee called “rage inflation” (One exception, perhaps, is “The Five,” a panel show starring four conservative co-hosts and one rotating co-leader on the left that beat Mr. Mr. Carlson by number of viewers in recent months.)
And as advertisers ran away, Mr. Carlson’s opening monologue grew. When he once spoke for only a few minutes, sometimes in neutral mode of simple questioning, he now often opened the show with a long steamwinder, addressing his audience with “you” and the objects of his rage as shadowy “they”. show that the monologues were a hit among viewers, according to a former and current Fox employee, and by 2020, Mr. Carlson regularly spoke directly to the camera for more than a quarter of the one-hour show. Instead of less Tucker, the audience got more.
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