Tucker Carlson has a very lame new “twitter show”. I think he and his lawyers think they can make the case that because it’s on social media instead of TV he’s not breaking his non-compete clause. He’s just a guy sharing his opinions and talking to his friends, amirite?
We’ll see how that goes. Fox is fighting it:
Fox News has demanded that Tucker Carlson stop posting videos to Twitter, escalating the dispute between the network and its former star host over how — and if — he can continue to speak publicly now that his prime-time show is off the air.
In a letter sent to Mr. Carlson from Fox lawyers, the network accused him of violating the terms of his contract, which runs until early 2025 and limits his ability to appear in media other than Fox. The letter is labeled “not for publication,” in all caps.
Since Mr. Carlson was ousted by Fox News, he has begun producing a bare-bones version of his Fox program, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” and posting it directly to Twitter. The new show, called “Tucker on Twitter,” bears some of the hallmarks of his prime-time show on Fox, including a monologue focused on current affairs and cultural issues.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, a lawyer representing Mr. Carlson, said in a statement that Fox News’s legal threat was not in the interest of the network’s audience.
“Doubling down on the most catastrophic programming decision in the history of the cable news industry, Fox is now demanding that Tucker Carlson be silent until after the 2024 election,” the statement read. “Tucker will not be silenced by anyone.”
Oooh baby. That Tucker is such a manly man isn’t he?
By the way, the stats for his new twitter show are dubious. Surprise:
Carlson debuted his new show, “Tucker on Twitter,” Tuesday of last week. The first episode drew what sound like monster stats: as of writing, Twitter says 114 million people have seen the 10-minute monologue in which Carlson rants about Ukraine and calls its Jewish president “sweaty and rat-like” and “a persecutor of Christians.”
His second episode, which dropped on Thursday, is already up to 54 million views (more than the entire population of South Korea).
The astonishing view count has prompted much celebration from Carlson and Musk’s fans, who stack those stats up against the apparently paltry ratings of cable news.
“CNN is lucky to get 500,000 viewers on a show,” crowed Carlson’s biographer Chadwick Moore. “Tucker’s video got 90 million, and counting—compared to his 3.5 million average on the dead and irrelevant medium of cable.”
“Fox News is screwing themselves,” declared radio host Jimmy Dore. “And legacy media is over.”
But there is little comparison between tweet views and cable news ratings.
First, let’s start with Carlson’s new Twitter show. Did one third of the United States watch Carlson’s first episode? Not exactly.
Musk has made a big push to show off the “tweet view” metric of posts on his platform, adding it to the interface. Now you can see how many people have viewed each tweet on the site. Last month, he hid the “video view” metric, which showed how many people watched a video on Twitter. Even the video view metric was pretty flimsy: according to Twitter, if you watch a video for two seconds, with only half the video player in-view, you count as one video view.
The tweet view metric is even less valuable. It merely counts how many people viewed the tweet, so if you scrolled past Carlson’s video on Twitter, you counted as one of the 114 million. “Anyone who is logged into Twitter who views a Tweet counts as a view,” Twitter says. If you scrolled past the tweet multiple times, you counted more than once.
Presumably, a small fraction of that big number watched even part of the clip. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on the video’s metrics.
Let’s compare that to cable news. When Musk’s boosters mock the 3.5 million that Carlson used to draw on his nightly Fox News show, they are referring to a metric from Nielsen that measures the average concurrent viewers of a program. If an average of 3.5 million people watched an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, the peak of concurrents is even higher, and the total viewership would be millions more.
As Steve Hasker, the former president of Nielsen who now serves as CEO of Thomson Reuters, explained in 2015: “In TV, the standard measurement unit for viewership is the average-minute audience — how many viewers there are in an average minute of content. In the digital space, on the other hand, video measurement is commonly expressed as the gross number of times the video is viewed, even if only for one minute or one second. These two metrics are quite different, and comparing one to the other unfairly tilts the comparison against TV.”
Nielsen does have a metric to measure total audience, called cumulative viewership. As Brian Stelter noted in the New York Times recently, Fox News drew a total audience of 63 million in the first quarter of 2023. CNN drew 68 million.
So no, 114 million people did not watch Carlson’s new show on Twitter. The tweets have certainly drawn a lot of eyeballs, but those metrics are simply not comparable to cable news ratings, which belie the total audience — and enduring influence — of the television industry.
Tucker is kind of pathetic at this point. His twitter show is done in a weird looking little shack set with slapdash production. I wouldn’t surprised if he did this on purpose to prove that he’s not doing a real “show” he’s just using free speech and sharing his ideas on twitter like any other citizen. Maybe it will even work.
But Tucker is no longer TUCKER without that platform. Sorry, twitter videos just aren’t the same.