Former centerpiece of the Fox News empire, Tucker Carlson, has announced he is rebooting his iconic show on Elon Musk’s Twitter.
“Starting soon, we’ll be bringing a new version of the show we’ve been doing for the last six and a half years to Twitter,” Carlson said during a 2 minute and 59 second announcement published on May 9 on the platform.
Carlson said, “We bring some other things too, which we’ll tell you about. But for now, we’re just grateful to be here.”
The move is a boon for the new Twitter. According to Reuters, Fox News was previously the most-watched cable news network and Tucker Carlson Tonight was the highest rated cable news program among 25 to 34-year-olds.
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In a lengthy preamble to the announcement, Carlson took full aim at the editorial practices of network media, telling his audience, “At the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie, a lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind.”
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“Facts have been withheld on purpose, along with proportion and perspective,” Carlson continued, adding, “You are being manipulated.”
The former Fox News icon used a simple example to explain his point:
“How does that work? Let’s see. If I tell you that a man has been unjustly arrested for armed robbery that is not, strictly speaking, a lie. He may have been framed. At this point, there’s been no trial, so no one can really say.
But if I don’t mention the fact that the same man has been arrested for the same crime six times before, am I really informing you?”
“No, I’m not. I’m misleading you,” he declared before adding, “And that’s what the news media are doing, in every story that matters, every day of the week, every week of the year.”
Establishment media’s coverage of Carlson’s announcement, which garnered a staggering 57.5 million views and almost 585,000 likes in slightly more than eight hours, ostensibly proved his point.
A CNN article published on the announcement was led with the following statement: “Right-wing extremist Tucker Carlson announced Tuesday that he will relaunch his program on Twitter.”
The outlet lamented that Carlson had “demonized the news media in his announcement video, accusing journalists of often excluding facts that detract from their narratives” while chastising the figure for failing to mention that “Musk has censored speech on Twitter, including banning several prominent reporters from the website just last year.”
But what CNN fails to disclose to readers as it presents this skew of events, is although Twitter did ban controversial figures such as The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz in December of 2022 for doxxing users prior to Musk’s acquisition, they were reinstated just a few days later.
Moreover, Twitter management prior to Musk’s buyout of the company is well documented as having operated a true system of narrative control censorship on critical topics such as the 2020 Presidential Election, the Jan. 6 Capitol Riots, and Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) government measures and mandatory vaccination, none of which were mentioned by CNN in its piece.
Platforming Twitter may be an enormous opportunity for Carlson as a tenured independent journalist and content creator. The app recently launched a new subscription feature, which allows influencers to charge a monthly fee and keep 97 percent of the revenue.
Once creators make $50,000 on the platform, their share drops to 80 percent.
Musk made it clear to users that Carlson was operating under the same rules available to everyone else when he stated in a same-day Tweet, “We have not signed a deal of any kind whatsoever,” adding that he hopes other journalists will set up shop on the platform “particularly from the left.”
In his announcement, Carlson told listeners, “After more than 30 years in the middle of” the current media system, “we can tell you stories.”
“The best you can hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to tell the fullest truth you can. But there are always limits, and you know that if you bump up against those limits often enough, you will be fired for it,” Carlson stated.
He continued, “That’s not a guess; it’s guaranteed. Every person who works in English-language media understands that.”
“The rule of what you can’t say defines everything. It’s filthy, really, and it’s utterly corrupting.”
The personality used this point to segue into why he chose Twitter as a platform to relaunch his personal brand: “Amazingly, as of tonight, there aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech.”
“The last big one remaining in the world, the only one, is Twitter, where we are now. Twitter has long served as the place where our national conversation incubates and develops,” he continued. “Twitter is not a partisan site. Everybody’s allowed here, and we think that’s a good thing.”
But Carlson regretted, “And yet for the most part the news that you see analyzed on Twitter comes from media organizations that are themselves thinly-disguised propaganda outlets.”
“You see it on cable news, you talk about it on Twitter. The result may feel like a debate, but actually, the gatekeepers are still in charge,” he added. “We think that’s a bad system. We know exactly how it works, and we’re sick of it.”
“Free speech is the main right that you have. Without it, you have no others. See you soon,” Tucker Carlson concluded.
Carlson made something of a test run of a Twitter launch on April 26 when he published his first video just two days after being fired by Fox.
The 2 minute and 16 second clip was albeit more general in its approach, but still pointed in its delivery as Carlson stated, “Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left but there are some, and that’s enough…At the same time, the liars who have been trying to silence them shrink, and they become weaker. That’s the iron law of the universe—true things prevail.”
The test was a massive success. As of time of writing, the clip has been viewed more than 82 million times and enjoys almost 1 million likes.
