Tucker Carlson May Be Losing His Relevance

In the two months since Tucker Carlson announced his Twitter show, the former Fox News host is seemingly losing his relevance. Carlson, whose top-rated cable show was abruptly canceled by Fox News in April, first teased his move to Twitter with a May announcement that drew a whopping 137 million views as of Monday, according to the platform’s publicly available data. The first episode of Tucker on Twitter, released early last month, was met with similar fanfare, notching 120 million views.

But in recent weeks, Carlson hasn’t come close to repeating those highs—a trend that’s already caught some media attention. Since mid-June, when the fourth episode of Tucker on Twitter aired, it hasn’t surpassed 33 million views. His eighth and latest episode—released on June 30—has managed only 9.1 million views as of publication. It’s also worth noting that those numbers can be easily misconstrued: The view count attached to all tweets—whether video, photo, or text—refers to the number of times a tweet was seen by anyone who came across it. It does not track how many users actually watched a video; rather, it lumps together those who quickly scrolled past along with those who hit the play button.

Indeed, an NBC News report deciphering the true number of Tucker on Twitter viewers found that his first episode, which had a public view count of 90 million at the time of the report, actually netted 26 million video views as of June 16. The subsequent two installments received 13.2 million and 18.7 million video views, per data given to NBC News by an analytics firm. (Interestingly, two weeks before the June 6 launch of Tucker on Twitter, which marked the first time a high-profile personality has opted to air a show exclusively on Twitter, some Twitter users noticed that the site had removed its video view counter.)    

All of this to say, Carlson’s social media adventure is perhaps not going as well as he’d hoped when he hailed it as the last big free speech platform left in the world. But Carlson also doesn’t seem wedded to Twitter, despite the fact that Elon Musk, who purchased the platform last October, has transformed it into a conservative haven. “I’m not working for Elon Musk. He hasn’t offered to hire me and if he did I wouldn’t accept. What he’s done is offered me what he’s offered every other user of Twitter, which is a chance to broadcast your views without a gatekeeper,” Carlson said in a recent appearance on comedian Russell Brand’s podcast. “What [Twitter] offers in the short term, at least for me, is an audience but also a better reason to write.”

In the same interview, Carlson told Brand that he still doesn’t know why Fox News terminated his show. And while the network, where Carlson remains under contract through December 2024, has actively sought to stamp out Tucker on Twitter, Carlson insisted that he harbors no ill will toward the company. “I was shocked, but I wasn’t really shocked, and I wasn’t mad. It’s not my company,” he said, adding later, “I don’t know why I was fired—I really don’t. I’m not angry about it. You can believe me or not, but I think you can feel that I’m not. And you know, I wish Fox well.”

When Carlson first lost his Fox News show, which for years had been among the network’s highest-rated programs, many questioned whether Carlson could hang on to relevance without Fox’s backing. It’s likely still too early to tell, but Twitter, at least right now, does really seem like only a short-term solution for the conservative personality. Sure, Carlson can get away with saying things that might get him in trouble on YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook, but Twitter has far fewer active users than those competitors. It also suffers from an infamously poor video player and has yet to provide creators with a way to monetize their videos, despite an assurance from Musk that Twitter will introduce revenue-sharing sometime in the future.

For a path forward that does not involve social media, Carlson might look at the man who last occupied his Fox News time slot: Bill O’Reilly, who left the network in 2017 following five sexual misconduct settlements. Once the undisputed king of cable news, O’Reilly has largely disappeared from political relevance since leaving Fox and now hosts a streaming show for a small conservative network. 

As for Fox News, it is still contending with possible legal trouble derived from Carlson’s programming. A lawyer representing Ray Epps, a man who says he has been falsely portrayed by Carlson and others as an undercover federal asset who helped foment the Capitol riot, hinted at that possibility in a statement to The New York Times this week. “We informed Fox in March that if they did not issue a formal on-air apology that we would pursue all available avenues to protect the Eppses’ rights,” said Michael Teter, Epps’s lawyer. “That remains our intent.” Fox News and Carlson did not respond to requests for comment.