In less than a week, Fox News has agreed to pay out $787.5m in a huge legal settlement and fired its most popular host, in an unprecedented crisis for the US’s most-watched cable news channel just as a critical presidential election cycle begins.
With the 2024 election essentially already under way, rightwing Fox News must now wrestle – quickly – with how to hold on to the audience that Tucker Carlson, the incendiary rightwing extremist who was fired on Monday, captured and cultivated during his murky seven-year tenure as a primetime host.
The early signs have not been great. Brian Kilmeade, a happy substitute, has already managed to lose nearly half of Carlson’s 3 million viewers, who appear to have decamped en masse to Newsmax, Fox News’ upstart competitor.
It’s a challenge for Fox News, which in the past few months has also found itself embarrassed by court disclosures which showed that Carlson, among others, did not believe much of the election fraud invective that Fox News’ audience was gobbling up night after night.
And with no ready-made replacement for Carlson – one viewer wrote on Twitter that they would “rather watch grass grow” than Kilmeade’s efforts – the channel faces a battle to win back viewers and maintain its supremacy among rightwing media.
“Short term, I’m sure it will be a challenge, not just because they’ve lost Tucker Carlson, but because there’ll be a backlash amongst his core fans, and the Maga-style Republicans who saw the way that Tucker Carlson was speaking to them, catering to them, and appreciated that,” said Eric Deggans, a TV critic at NPR and author of Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation.
The way Carlson was catering to those viewers was unprecedented. Carlson, a privately educated multimillionaire, had a Trump-esque knack for knowing what would terrify and activate millions of mostly white, extremely aggrieved, rightwing Americans.
He did so by leading viewers, like a prep-school Pied Piper, through a nightly list of perceived grievances, creating a program that, in the words of the New York Times, “may be the most racist show in the history of cable news”.
“He was normalizing some tenets of white supremacy. So I’m sure there were white supremacists and racists who also loved his show. And they are probably all going to be angry with Fox for a little while,” Deggans said.
“But ultimately, I think Rupert Murdoch and the folks who run Fox realize they are the biggest game in town. They have the largest megaphone, they reach the largest segment of conservative news consumers of just about any media outlet.
“So at some point, people wind up going back to them. They may be upset for a while, but if Tucker Carlson’s permanent replacement picks up his mantle and starts talking about things the way he did, I think they’ll get those people back.”
Fox News found itself in a similar situation following the 2020 election. The network was the first to declare that Arizona had voted for Joe Biden, which caused outcry among viewers who had been convinced – by places like Fox News – that Donald Trump would coast to victory, and they voted with their remotes.
Both Newsmax and One America News Network saw huge spikes in viewers in the days and weeks following Fox News’ call – Donald Trump weighing in probably hastened the departure – but in the months that followed the audience returned.
“Losing Tucker Carlson, it’s a loss for Tucker Carlson,” said Heather Hendershot, author of When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America and a media professor at MIT who studies conservative and rightwing media.
“He’s probably not going to find anywhere to make as much money as he made at Fox. But Fox will handily recover from this.”
Hendershot said Fox News has lost big stars before – including Bill O’Reilly, who was the top-rated cable news host before he was forced out amid a series of sexual harassment allegations, and Glenn Beck, who brought his jaunty ouevre to Fox News before parting ways with the network in 2011.
“Ultimately, they will find a replacement and they’ll be fine,” said Hendershot.
“You can always find stars, and only a few people are genuinely unreplaceable. With most people you can find someone else and develop new talent,” she said.
Hendershot said there could even be an upside. Fox News is not particularly reliant on advertiser money – the majority of its revenue comes from contracts with cable companies, who pay for the right to air the channel – but getting rid of Carlson, who major advertisers have run a mile from in recent years, could boost that income.
“If Fox News found someone with a slightly less white nationalist orientation, that might help them gain some more respectable advertisers,” Hendershot said.
“That might help in the short term, and help them potentially with their renewal negotiations with all the cable companies. And then as soon as they’ve got that dealt with, they can go right back to the Carlson line, but maybe via a different personality type, someone with a different entertainment persona.”
Fox News’ fee for cable companies to carry its show is currently $2.18 per subscriber, according to Media Matters for America. Several of Fox News’ contracts with those companies are due to expire in the next two years, however, and Vanity Fair reported that the network plans to hike its fee to $3, vastly increasing revenue.
When it comes to those negotiations, Carlson’s departure could be a blessing and a curse, said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters.
“Fox has a business model with an inherent contradiction, which is that they amass this huge audience by giving them what they want – and what they want is rightwing propaganda and bigotry and conspiracy theories,” Gertz said.
“But they monetize that audience through business partners – with advertisers and cable carriers – who do not necessarily want to be associated with that sort of thing.”
With its audience furious over Carlson’s departure, Fox News’ contradiction conundrum is particularly acute, Gertz said – as the channel inevitably faces a battle to win back the viewers who have left for places like Newsmax.
“What is good for building the audience is not good for monetizing the audience. And that’s the crux of the problem that Fox faces right now,” Gertz said.
“Now they need to prove their bona fides because all of their competitors are coming out and saying that they’ve turned [away from the right wing].
“But if they try to do that, they lose any gain that they’ve made with the advertisers, the business partners, by getting rid of Tucker Carlson. So it’s a difficult position.”
