Six weeks or so after being ousted at Fox News, the cable network’s former ratings king Tucker Carlson proved recent rumors about a new show true in the form of a brand new opinion-heavy news program not on television proper, but released through Twitter. The popular, though controversial, host seemed to further prove just how much more accessible online content is for potential viewers, as the first installment of Tucker on Twitter drew in almost surprisingly massive numbers. But was the new show something he was even contractually allowed to release?
Tucker On Twitter’s Huge Viewership Numbers
Tucker Carlson’s first exclusively online TV venture arrived in the form of a video that wasn’t quite 11-minutes long, but managed to cram in a lot of what likely would have been covered had this been an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight on cable. And it’s been clear that viewers were eager to see what the conservative journo had to say, with the Episode 1 video currently boasting a view total north of 66.2 million, and it’s still rising. By all means, that’s more than half of the total audience for a Super Bowl in any given year.
Compared to the audience that frequented his former home at Fox News, Carlson appears to have struck gold, silver, diamonds, platinum, Zonaite, unobtanium, and Vibranium with his latest effort. At the time of his forced exit, Tucker Carlson Tonight was averaging more than 3 million viewers, and that number quickly dropped in the aftermath, with a revolving door of guest hosts heading up the replacement series Fox News Tonight. The cable channel’s numbers indeed sagged across all metrics in the first full month without the host.
Now, to be clear, this isn’t the most level playing field for viewership comparisons to be made. Carlson’s Twitter upload has been streamed steadily since it was posted, without viewers needing to be locked into a specific TV airtime, and offer real-time stats as opposed to DVR/delayed viewer totals taking longer to get tallied. (Not to mention show clips being viewed by tons of people on YouTube and social media, which usually won’t be applied to the TV ratings stats directly.) As well, there’s no telling how many people clicked onto the video to see what it was, only to click away immediately without watching the full thing. Even with those caveats, though, it’s still mightily impressive.
Was Tucker Carlson Contractually Allowed To Make His Twitter Show?
One of the oddball stipulations involved with Tucker Carlson’s Fox News exit is that it wasn’t exactly an outright firing, at least not in the way Don Lemon was booted from CNN on the same day. Prior to the new show’s debut, Carlson was known to still be under contract with Fox for a deal that wasn’t meant to expire until January 2025, with the host still set to take in his $20 million a year salary. Conversations about his ability to bring his talents to other platforms increased after Newsmax was reportedly set to drop big money and job titles on Carlson, had he been able to take such agreements.
So for him to have produced and released the episode on Twitter, it stands to reason that Carlson is either not contractually bound to Fox News anymore, or that the specific stipulations tied to putting out videos on the social media platform somehow don’t run counter to whatever obligations he’d had. It’s entirely possible that this doesn’t necessarily count as a competing entity.
The only comment Carlson made about potentially not delivering more Twitter content related to the social platform’s powers that be, and Twitter’s stance as a free speech outlet. In his words:
We’re told there are no gatekeepers here. If that turns out to be false, we’ll leave. But in the meantime, we are grateful to be here. We will be back with much more very soon.
For now, fans can obviously rewatch the “episode” on Twitter while waiting to see what the next step will be for Tucker Carlson’s post-Fox news career.
