In early June 2020, Mr. Carlson told his audience that the Black Lives Matter protests were “definitely not about Black Lives” and “remember that when they come for you”. The next night, when Fox’s public relations team insisted that Mr. Carlson was mischaracterized, Mr. Carlson forward. “The crowd came before us — irony of irony,” he told Fox viewers. “They have been trying for the past 24 hours to take the show off the air for good. Fortunately they will not succeed. We work for one of the last brave companies in America, and they are not intimidated.”
Off-camera, Mr. Carlson can be less challenging. In a conversation that spring with Eric Owens, one of his former collaborators at The Daily Caller, he worried that the controversy over his show had made it difficult for his children to get jobs and internships; he was afraid that his younger children would not go to university. “It’s not right that this affects my family and literally affects the future of my children,” said Mr. Carlson, according to Mr. Owens.
But it’s less clear whether the attacks significantly affected Fox’s outcome: To make up for the lost advertising, Fox turned “Tucker Carlson Tonight” into a promotional engine for the network itself. It replaced the fleeing sponsors with a deluge of internal promos, showing Mr. Carlson was used to direct viewers to other more advertiser-friendly offerings. According to data from analytics company iSpot.tv, in early 2019, about one-fifth of all advertising “impressions” on the show came from internal ads. That summer, when Fox fended off criticism of Mr. Carlson’s “hoax” statements, the stock climbed to more than a third. (A Fox spokeswoman said the actual proportions were lower, but declined to provide specific numbers.) “Fox is, in fact, a huge loyalty brand,” said Jason Damata, the CEO of Fabric Media, a media consulting firm. “He’s the hook.”
Other advertising spaces were occupied by direct-to-consumer brands that either didn’t care about Mr. Carlson, either saw that they could use his intensity to sell their products. Beginning in January 2019, MyPillow, a Fox advertiser whose chief executive, Mike Lindell, is a major promoter of Trump’s stolen election lie, began running more than $1 million worth of ads on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” each month. It looked like Fox was using MyPillow to get Mr. Protect Carlson: As other ads dried up, the company’s ads skyrocketed. (All things considered, through December 2021, Mr. Lindell had bought ads that would have cost $91 million at published rates; discounts likely lowered that amount.)
Blue chip advertisers would never return to the current show. But thanks in part to the large audience he was able to provide to the remaining advertisers, and the premium prices Fox could charge them, Mr. Carlson’s ad revenues began to recover. According to iSpot estimates, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has had more annual ad revenue for Fox every year since 2018 than any other show. Last May, after promoting the white supremacist “replacement theory,” Mr. Carlson had half as many advertisers as he did in December 2018, but brought in nearly twice as much money.
As “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became more toxic to advertisers, there were also fewer guests who disagreed with the host and more guests who simply read Mr. Carlson repeated or reinforced. It wasn’t just that liberals didn’t want to argue with him, though some now refused to appear on the show, such as Mr. Carlson complained during a Fox gig last summer; Fox learned that the public didn’t necessarily like hearing from the other side. “From my discussions with Fox News bookers, my conclusion is that they’ve come to the conclusion that they’re just not doing debate segments anymore,” said Richard Goodstein, a Democratic lobbyist and campaign adviser who is a regular on Mr. Carlson appeared through the summer of 2020. Across much of the Fox lineup, former employees said producers increasingly relied on panels of pro-Trump conservatives competing to see who could more fervently condemn Democrats — a rating gambit that a former Fox employee called “rage inflation.” (An exception might be “The Five,” a panel show with four conservative co-hosts and a rotating co-host from the left, which has beaten Mr. Carlson’s total viewership in recent months.)
And as advertisers fled, Mr. Carlson. Where he used to speak for only a few minutes, sometimes in a neutral, just-ask mode, he now often opened the show with a long voice winder, addressing his audience as “you” and the objects of his anger as a shadowy “she.” ” Review data showed the monologues were a hit with viewers, according to a former and current Fox employee, and by 2020, Mr. Carlson was regularly speaking directly to the camera for more than a quarter of the hour-long show, rather than less. Tucker got the audience more.
