One day after airing his new Twitter show, Tucker Carlson and his lawyers received a cease and desist letter from his former employer, Fox News, according to a report from Axios. Carlson continues to be paid, under contract, by Fox News, and the right-wing media giant says he has violated the terms of his contract. Carlson’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, says this is a First Amendment issue. He intimated that Carlson’s new show on Elon Musk’s social media platform amounts to the trust fund baby taking “to social media to share his thoughts on current events.”
Another Carlson attorney, Harmeet Dhillon, added to the statement, writing, “Fox News continues to ignore the interests of its viewers, not to mention its shareholder obligations. Doubling down on the most catastrophic programming decision in the history of the cable news industry, Fox is now demanding that Tucker Carlson be silent until after the 2024 election. Tucker will not be silenced by anyone—whether it be Media Matters, the ADL or Fox News.” Before Carlson’s Twitter show aired, his lawyers argued that it was Fox that violated the details of the contract.
Swinging for the fences, Twitter claims Carlson’s show was watched by more than 100 million people! Of course, looking into how Twitter counts “views” and “watching” makes those numbers as suspicious as the special guest star on an episode of “Columbo.” But like everything in the right-wing world, facts are not important—the perception of facts is.
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Mediate points out that the metrics involved here are dubious to say the least.
Musk has made a big push to show off the “tweet view” metric of posts on his platform, adding it to the interface. Now you can see how many people have viewed each tweet on the site. Last month, he hid the “video view” metric, which showed how many people watched a video on Twitter. Even the video view metric was pretty flimsy: according to Twitter,if you watch a video for two seconds, with only half the video player in-view, you count as one video view.
As for “views,” anyone who scrolls past a tweet, whether they register it in their brains or not, counts as a view.
Carlson was unceremoniously fired from the right-wing media outlet back in April. The details of why Fox News decided to part ways with the popular conservative media mouthpiece remains fodder for speculation. Most theories floated by traditional media outlets seem to reveal more about outlets’ public relations sources than about the real details of what went down at Fox News.
Whatever the real issues are, they seem to clearly not be ideological. Fox News and Tucker have continued to promote the same dangerous white supremacist rhetoric, mixed with misogyny, transphobia, and everything else the Republican Party campaigns on these days.
Here’s Tucker on his new show:
Nothing new here. In fact, it’s the kind of thinking that should have gone extinct centuries ago but has been used as a wedge to stoke a misdirected sense of grievance in white men about how unfairly our system works.
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