The host is gone, but his audience’s appetite for white nationalist propaganda remains.
beliefs. Even as Carlson comported himself as one of Donald Trump’s most fervent cheerleaders, he told others privately that he hated the president “passionately.”
In truth, Carlson’s incendiary content did not reflect his own idiosyncratic beliefs so much as his audience’s revealed preferences. As the New York, the driving force behind Carslon’s far-right turn was “minute-by-minutes” ratings, data that tracks the size of a show’s audience at 60-second intervals. Determined to avoid a reprise of his previous failures to retain a large audience at CNN and MSNBC, Carlson became one of his “network’s most avid consumers of minute-by-minutes.
To the extent that any personal quality informed the exceptional racism of Carlson’s program, it seems to have been nihilistic ruthlessness. No sense of decency prevented Carlson from declaring white supremacydays after a white-nationalist terrorist mass-murdered Hispanic Americans in El Paso, nor from stoking fears of a migrant “invasion” right after similar ideas inspired a neo-Nazi to shoot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
reported last year, Carlson’s strategy reflected an emerging editorial consensus at Fox News’ commanding heights. Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch reportedly has even more sympathy for far-right politics than his father, Rupert. Meanwhile, Fox News vice-president Tom Lowell championed a “Moneyball” approach to programming: allowing the wisdom of the crowds to determine editorial decisions.
Of course, just because there are economic incentives to emulate Carlson does not mean his successor will do so. Plenty of Fox News’ existing hosts have chosen to refrain frompromulgating white-nationalist conspiracy theories, even as Carlson rode them to ratings supremacy. Nevertheless, the fact that Carlson’s editorial line reflected a data-driven assessment of which subjects will keep America’s news viewers from changing channels should temper optimism for Fox’s future.
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