Tucker Carlson is about to find out if he’s bigger than Fox News
LA TimesThere are many reasons Tucker Carlson’s substantial fan base might abandon him. The various lines of business — including merchandise branded “Team Normal,” as opposed to those he derides as “Team Crazy” — mean O’Reilly is “probably doing very well for himself, though we have no idea the exact revenue that’s coming in,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University who wrote a book on Fox News. “It’s likely he’ll transition onto some new media platform or to start his own media platform,” said Cassino, author of “Fox News and American Politics: How One Channel Shapes American Politics and Society.” “He’ll probably want to monetize the audience he’s got, and the easiest way to do that is to have a website, have a podcast a streaming service.” Cassino also predicted that Fox will suffer only a temporary loss of viewers from Carlson’s coveted 8 p.m. time slot. In the texts, Carlson belittled Trump’s record as a businessman, slammed the former president for not attending Joe Biden’s inauguration, pined for a time when he would no longer have to talk about Trump and expressed a deep disdain for a man he called “a demonic force, a destroyer.” Tucker Carlson with former President Trump at the LIV Golf Invitational at Trump National in Bedminster, N.J., in 2022. “You can’t control all this stuff that’s going on,” Carlson said in a long riff, positioning himself — despite his considerable wealth and prominence — as vulnerable.