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CNN
—
Tucker Carlson is back, sort of.
Nearly a month after promising to return to right-wing commentary via Elon Musk’s Twitter show, the fired Fox News anchor made good on his promise Tuesday evening, posting a 10-minute monologue on the platform of social networks.
The comment, which appeared next to a “Tucker on Twitter” logo in the corner of the screen, had the same style viewers have come to expect from Carlson, a conspiracy talk show host who gave voice to some of the most extreme ideas of right-wing politics.
Katie Robertson and Jeremy Peters of the NYT summarizes the first episode thus: “He expressed sympathy for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and mocked President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. He accused the mainstream media of lying. He ended by declaring that UFOs and extraterrestrial life are “really real.”
“Starting today, we’ve hit Twitter,” Carlson said in the video. “They tell us there are no doormen here. If that turns out to be false, we’ll leave.”
Carlson’s move could inflame behind-the-scenes negotiations with Fox News, given that Carlson remains under contract with the network. Carlson has hired power attorney Bryan Freedman to help him in those efforts, according to multiple reports.
Regardless, whether the Twitter show has the same influence and reach as Carlson’s single Fox News time slot is far from certain. Prime time on Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing network is uniquely powerful and unrivaled in the conservative media ecosystem. Carlson faces an uphill climb if he hopes to regain the power he once enjoyed through Twitter videos.
The first episode of “Tucker on Twitter” didn’t help. The debut video looked like a thin shell of Carlson’s old show. The production quality was simple, with the audio humming softly in the background as Carlson used his spare hand to scroll the teleprompter.
Carlson’s supporters, in addition to those who would like to believe that Musk can use Twitter to destroy the mainstream press, claimed that Carlson’s debut was a success, with more than 20 million views at the time of this publication. But what counts as a video view on Twitter is unclear. Musk himself he said that “It simply counts whether you saw the post in the X/Twitter app or through the web browser, not how long you looked at it.” In contrast, Nielsen, the gold standard for TV ratings, provides data on the average number of concurrent viewers, not the cumulative number of views. Both datasets are apples and oranges.
However, Musk she celebrated Carlson’s hug of his platform on Tuesday, retweeting the video to his 140 million followers: “It would be great to have shows from all sides of the political spectrum on this platform!”
