The media upstarts grew up — and went bankrupt
Last week I was at a writers’ party in Miami, a city at the cutting edge of tech, finance, the creator economy and nightlife. Naturally the writers were talking about themselves. I asked someone what he would do if he didn’t have to worry about pageviews or proprietors or the other pressing concerns of the modern media. “Think VICE, when it was good,” he replied.
The number of suckers Americans subscribing to pay TV has hit its lowest level since 1992.
Well, this is inevitable when every time you turn on your TV, there’s a guy in a dress being treated seriously or two fellas smooching.
Capitalism’s brutal lessons for BuzzFeed, Vice, Gawker. And: Will Tucker Carlson’s Twitter bet pay off?
In his novel This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald makes occasional mentions of something he calls “the electric.” The book, Fitzgerald’s first, was written in 1919 and published in 1920, precisely the era when cars were overtaking the horse and buggy; “the electric” was how people a century ago referred to an electric car.
Electric cars were expensive, but if you had money, you favored them because they didn’t require a hand crank. It wasn’t long, though, before the electric was overtaken by Henry Ford’s cheaper, more reliable—and gasoline-powered—Model T. After which every entrepreneur who had bet on electric cars was soon out of business. They’d made a bet on the future, and they’d lost. Welcome to capitalism.
Former Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson announced Tuesday his show will air exclusively on Twitter from this point forward.
We’re back. pic.twitter.com/sG5t9gr60O
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) May 9, 2023
h/t XC
Tucker Carlson seems to be enjoying his time away from his now-defunct Fox News show, while the network’s primetime lineup continues its descent into ratings nothingness.
Brutal.
To Democrats and their partners in the corporate media and Department of Justice, everything is about maintaining a narrative, and there’s no better example of this than their disparate reactions to the March Nashville shooting and this week’s Texas shooting.
… According to a new report, Carlson is attempting to get out of his contract, which binds him to Fox News until January 2025, so that he can move on to the next phase of his career. To achieve this, he intends to make Fox News executives’ lives extremely difficult.
Late-night hosts kiss up to their guests all the time. It’s in the job description.
That’s how you treat celebrity guests, one of the few elements today’s far-left hosts retain from the Johnny Carson blueprint of yore.
Americans are fed up with being insulted by cable news.
It was a tale of two firings last week in the American media. Two famous anchors, with two very different profiles and styles, were unceremoniously ousted by their corporate overlords. Conservative bête noire Tucker Carlson and liberal malcontent Don Lemon were both dropped from their channels, on the very same day.
Brash millennial upstarts were once the future of news
A decade ago, as a young war reporter for Vice News, I had the nagging feeling that one day I’d find my wizened older self, like an old NME journalist droning on about punk, reminiscing about the time when we brash millennial upstarts had the world of TV newsgathering at our feet. But I never expected it to be so soon.
Vice Media is preparing to file for bankruptcy – after attempts to find a buyer for a company once valued at $5.7 billion appeared to be going nowhere.
More than five companies have expressed interest in acquiring Vice, The New York Times reported on Monday, but the chances of a sale are seen as increasingly remote.
The decline of Vice comes a little over a week after BuzzFeed News announced its closure, and three months after Vox laid off 130 people, representing 7 percent of staff.
Vice, Buzzfeed, Vox. Commonality? All left all the time. The market is saturated.
WASHINGTON (AP) — When it comes to the news media and the impact it’s having on democracy and political polarization in the United States, Americans are likelier to say it’s doing more harm than good.
Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults say the news media is increasing political polarization in this country, and just under half say they have little to no trust in the media’s ability to report the news fairly and accurately, according to a new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.
In the wake of Tucker Carlson’s sudden departure this week, ratings for Fox News’s new 8 p.m. weekday show appear to be on the decline as viewership again tumbled on Wednesday night.
Data published by ratings service Nielsen show that Fox drew some 1.33 million viewers for substitute host Brian Kilmeade and “Fox News Tonight” in the timeslot that Carlson once occupied. That places the network at No. 2 behind MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
His show’s cancellation removes from the national debate a fearless voice for a perspective hard to find elsewhere.
On Monday night, Fox News aired a segment about the threats that Matt Taibbi had received from House Democrats, and how journalists like him increasingly must choose to stay silent under pressure or face the consequences. The report was spot on—except, on that day of all days, it felt out of place. What made that day special, of course, was that Fox News itself had just fired Tucker Carlson, its highest-rated single personality.
Since the ouster of Tucker Carlson, Fox News’ ratings have plummeted. The demo ratings (based on viewers aged 25-54) released yesterday from Tuesday night reveal every show on Fox from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. significantly dropped in numbers. “The Five” was down 7 percent, Brett Baier’s “Special Report” was down 23 percent, “Jesse Watters Primetime” was down 35 percent, “Hannity” was down 44 percent, and “The Ingraham Angle” was down 20 percent. Carlson’s old 8 p.m. time slot was hit the hardest — down nearly 70 percent compared to last Tuesday.
