On MSNBC, Angelo Carusone explains that “Tucker Carlson can't do anywhere else what he did at Fox News”
Published
Citation From the April 29, 2023, edition of MSNBC's Ayman Mohyeldin Reports
AYMAN MOHYELDIN (HOST): Angelo, put this in context for us, how big is Tucker Carlson's exit, not for Fox, but for the broader Republican Party? I mean, this is the same person who House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave exclusive access to the unreleased January 6 footage, other politicians who are nervous about what Ted Cruz, or what Tucker Carlson was doing like Ted Cruz, and outside of Donald Trump I'd probably say was the most influential conservative voice in this country.
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT, MEDIA MATTERS): Completely. And I think it's really important for people to understand that it was just getting to the point where he was too big to fail. So when Rush Limbaugh died, it's worth keeping in mind that in 2022 was the first election in a quarter-century where Rush Limbaugh was not the single largest get-out-the-vote operation in the country. And that's how significant he was, not just in the right-wing media landscape because it's an echo chamber, but also because what that echo chamber was able to do, which is shape policy, culture, day-to-day lives of people. It's so big. He sort of sat atop that and had enormous agenda setting power, he and Fox News.
And what Tucker did when that void was created was that he stepped into it, and he sort of pulled things from various factions of the right-wing media, and he had that agenda setting power. And you saw that play out time and again, not just in giving permission structures to things that used to be on the fringe and mainstreaming it like Great Replacement Theory, but also that he's setting narratives and messaging for the Republican Party. In the lead up to the midterms in 2022, he gave this big thing in August saying that the message has got to be crime. And you could see in real time all of the ads from congressional candidates, Republican congressional candidates switching, Fox News' coverage increasing their crime coverage during that time period. So much so that literally starting the day after the election in 2022, Fox News' crime coverage dropped by more than half almost overnight, because everything started to do and reflect what Tucker was advocating on his show. And that's the power that's at stake here.
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MOHYELDIN: Angelo, speaking of platforms and where he goes next and what he does, his competitors, or Fox's competitors in the right wing media, like The Daily Wire, former Fox host Glenn Beck's TheBlaze, they have suggested that they'd offered him a role on their networks. Newsmax is reportedly approaching Carlson for a deal. But is there any place that he can go where he'd have the same level of influence? Again, I mean, we saw what happened to folks like Bill O'Reilly and Megyn Kelly, even Beck, after their exits from Fox, they may have an audience but nowhere close to what they had at Fox.
CARUSONE: Yeah. Tucker Carlson can't do anywhere else what he did at Fox News. Because what made him powerful and influential, it wasn't just the 8 pm time slot, it was the wraparound that Fox News provided. The ability to operationalize that segment, that power, into the Fox News landscape and then reverberate through the echo chamber. Even if he goes somewhere and has a bigger audience -- and let's be real, he did have 3 million viewers. But the 15th largest radio host has like 8 million viewers. So viewership alone is not a reflection of power and influence when we're talking about the right-wing media and its effect on the echo chamber. You need that network to be able to implement and operationalize it. He will have influence, he'll be able to leapfrog some stuff into the larger conversation, he is still a destructive and horrible voice and I don't think we should discount that. But his ability to marshal forces, really the only last threat that could actually be -- the only thing that he still has power over, at least in the near future, is going to be Fox News itself. He doesn't have his holds on the levers anymore, he could damage Fox, that's about it.
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MOHYELDIN: Angelo, really quickly, we're almost out of time. What is the message that was sent to other people like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham? Because at the end of the day, they're peddling in so many of the same narratives, if not different tone, but same narratives that Tucker Carlson was.
CARUSONE: I think the message was at least for them, which play ball, start being a team player. That used to be Fox's number one rule, right, is that you don't sort of attack or criticize inside of the tent, and Tucker was the worst offender there. So it was get in line, and it was get on board with whatever the Fox agenda is. And I think that's their big message. The other is, we can do anything we want. There isn't anybody here that's bigger than the boss, and that's the Murdochs. And I think that's the big takeaway for everyone and I think it's going to create a lot of uneasiness within Fox right now.