Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson says the cable news business is in trouble.
“I really do think the cable news business has a limited future,” Carlson told journalist and author Chadwick Moore as part of comments published Monday. “It’s too obviously controlled. It’s like Google — it’s just become too clear that there’s a certain selection of stories that are allowed, and a very thick file of stories that are not allowed. And I think people have come to understand that, and it’s just not sustainable.”
Moore, a conservative writer, is penning a forthcoming book on Carlson’s life and career and has spent weeks with the longtime television news personality, including in the days following his departure from Fox, the top-rated network on cable.
Carlson was ousted from his prime-time post just days after the network agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement money stemming from its coverage of former President Trump’s claims about the 2020 election.
Carlson, who worked as a host and contributor at CNN and MSNBC before joining Fox, has since launched a new version of his wildly popular show on Twitter, spurring the network to send him and his lawyers a cease and desist letter this week saying he is in breach of his contractual agreement with the network.
Cable news ratings have been in steady decline since Trump’s time in the White House, though Fox remains the top dog in total day and overall prime-time viewers.
Industry experts have warned more broadly warned that a dwindling ad market coupled with more Americans cutting cable poses serious risks to the cable news ecosystem.
Carlson has separately praised the work of Twitter CEO Elon Musk and noted the growing influence of social media on American politics.
“I really think people are on to it, don’t you?” he asked Moore. “I see these clips of people on podcasts or just taking video of themselves on Twitter, and you can tell when someone’s really telling the whole truth. It’s obvious right away. Maybe I don’t agree with the person, but I can see this person is not lying, he’s saying what he really thinks, and that’s immediately perceptible. You can tell when someone’s lying to you or when someone’s shading the truth or trying to spin you. And there’s a lot of artifice in television.”
In the first episode of his Twitter show, published last month, Carlson blasted the mainstream news media generally, saying he had come to Twitter, “which we hope will be the short wave radio under the blankets.”
“We’re told there are no gatekeepers here,” Carlson said. “If that turns out to be false, we’ll leave. But in the meantime, we’re grateful to be here.”