The Cable-News Bubble

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, March 08, 2022

 

Two facts that seem contradictory but are both true: (1) Tucker Carlson has the most-watched cable-news show in the country, and (2) basically nobody watches Tucker Carlson.

 

Last year, Carlson’s Fox News program averaged 3.2 million viewers a night, making it an absolute ratings juggernaut by current cable-news standards but reaching fewer than 1 percent of our nation’s 330 million people. Going by that 2021 average, Carlson has a far smaller audience than does, say, Judge Steve Harvey (4.5 million) or reruns of Young Sheldon (4.3 million).

 

Reruns of Young Sheldon do pretty big numbers, but new episodes of that comedy typically outperform the top three programs on Fox News combined.

 

None of this is to piss on Carlson’s show or on Fox News — Carlson leads the list, and seven of the top ten cable-news programs in 2021 were Fox offerings. (The other three of the top ten were on MSNBC.) The channel and its most popular host clearly know what they are doing. But we live in a very fractured media landscape, and the most widely shared points of cultural reference are not the cable-news mouthholes.

 

Without passing any judgment on the artistic merits of Young Sheldon, that is probably a good thing. People who spend a lot of time in front of Fox News or MSNBC are not in the main what you’d call happy and well-adjusted people. But they do have a relatively big footprint in our politics.

 

In 1983, ABC broadcast a made-for-television movie about nuclear war called The Day After. It was watched by something between 77 million and 100 million people, depending on which estimate you accept. (I watched it, and so did the two little kids I was babysitting that evening; they had nightmares for weeks.) The same year, 106 million people tuned in to watch the last episode of M*A*S*H*; by way of comparison, only 19 million people watched the final episode of Game of Thrones. Other than Super Bowls and the 2016 presidential debates, you won’t see very many broadcasts that have the kind of wide viewership that makes them genuinely national experiences.

 

We’ve been talking about that “fractured media landscape” for a few decades now. But the fractures seem to be getting deeper. The news environment in 2004 was not very much like what it was in the heyday for the Big Three networks, when the national news conversation was dominated by (that seething crackpot) Walter Cronkite, but Dan Rather was still a big enough cultural presence at that time that his fraudulent report on George W. Bush’s military service — a pre-election hit piece — became a momentary national obsession. That episode was, among other things, the launchpad of modern right-wing Internet journalism as we know it.

 

But Dan Rather today — 90 years old and bonkers as he is — probably remains more widely known than most of the leading television-news figures of our time. My media friends were very interested in the Chris Cuomo story, but when I asked my non-media friends about that teapot tempest, the almost universal response was: “Who?”

 

Over the weekend, Saturday Night Live opened its show with a parody of Laura Ingraham (played by Kate McKinnon) and Tucker Carlson (Alex Moffat), who were shown hosting a gala fundraiser for poor, suffering Russian oligarchs. The point was a serious one, but I did find myself wondering how something like that would really land with the general population. The media care intensely about the media, which is why Fox News figures figure so prominently in SNL sketches and why right-wing talk radio spends about 75 percent of its oxygen denouncing the so-called mainstream media. Jon Stewart cares a great deal about Tucker Carlson. But I doubt that very much of SNL’s audience knows Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham well enough even to know whether the impressions of them were any good. (Yes for McKinnon’s Ingraham, no for Moffat’s Carlson; Moffat would be closer to the mark if he simply remained in his “Guy Who Just Bought a Boat” character.) I suppose it is enough for SNL’s purposes that its audience is made up mostly of people who know that Tucker Carlson exists and that they are expected to hate him, that Fox News is a thing and that they are expected to hate it.

 

(I wonder how many people who watched Watchmen realized that the pundit-show parody in the opening scene was supposed to be The McLaughlin Group, once an inescapable cultural presence for a certain kind of American and another favorite SNL target; I wonder how many people watching Aladdin get the William F. Buckley Jr. impersonation or know that there was such a thing as Firing Line. Damned few, I’d bet.)

 

We hear a great deal of worry about people living in “bubbles,” with highly partisan broadcast programs and social media combining to sort Americans into silos in which most of their information and their social interactions all have the same political and cultural stamp. I suppose that is a problem for the general electorate, though I am not entirely convinced that it is a very large problem. (More precisely, I believe it is more of an effect than a cause.) Some Americans may live in a Tucker Carlson bubble while others live in a Rachel Maddow bubble, but those aren’t the only kinds of bubbles. If you have spent very much time around media figures and politicians, then you will understand that however their respective audiences are sorted, Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson live in the same bubble.

 

Top-shelf Fox News hosts and their MSNBC counterparts are all multimillionaire employees of multinational media conglomerates, they typically work one block away from each other at their respective studios in Manhattan, they live in the same neighborhoods if not in the same buildings, their children go to the same schools, etc. — and they have a lot more in common with one another than either has in common with the shmucks who compose their audiences, in the same way two competing dairymen have more in common with one another than either has in common with the herds of cows they milk. The chief of staff for a Democratic senator has more in common with the chief of staff of a Republican senator than either has in common with most of the people who elect those senators. Etc.

 

I can’t help thinking that there is a lost political opportunity in all of this. I recently had a conversation with an elected official who is a frequent target of cable-news and talk-radio ire, and that media attention was pretty low on his list of things to worry about — he rarely if ever hears anything about that kind of stuff from any of the people who elect him. Apparently, nobody back home cares as much about Tucker Carlson as SNL does. And that is to be expected.

 

But acting on that knowledge is not a simple thing. For one thing, Tucker Carlson’s 1 percent may not look like much, but the number of people who are willing to spend an hour watching Fox News still is much larger than the number of people who are willing to spend an hour listening to a serious conversation about tax reform or unfunded mandates. It is many multiples of the circulation of this magazine or any other American political magazine. Carlson’s nightly audience is considerably larger than the number of people who bought the best-selling book of 2021. (It was a graphic novel.) The best-selling political book of that year, Mark Levin’s American Marxism, sold just over 1 million copies in 2021; the second-best-selling political book didn’t move enough units to make the overall top-25 list.

 

In the most recent Gallup poll of issues that Americans care most about, only 1 percent said taxes were their top concern, 1 percent said wages, 1 percent said foreign policy, 1 percent said education. If we set aside the vague (“the government”) and the unusual (Covid), the leading issue, far and away, was inflation — and that concern led the list for only 8 percent of those polled. Joe Biden was elected president by only 24.6 percent of all Americans, and he won the Democratic nomination on an even smaller number of votes — 19 million, or about 5.8 percent of all Americans.

 

Small, highly motivated groups of people can wield tremendous power at certain democratic bottlenecks, such as primary elections, and broadcast activism of the cable-news and talk-radio variety may have an outsized influence for that reason. But that influence should not be exaggerated: Even the most energetic partisan media is not reliably all that good at selling crazy, even in Texas — ask Don Huffines, the talk-radio hero who got massacred in the Texas GOP gubernatorial primary, or Representative Louie Gohmert, a gadfly on the nut circuit who finished fourth in the AG primary with only 17 percent of the vote.

 

I don’t know anybody who does a good Greg Abbott impersonation, on Saturday Night Live or anywhere else. But he sure gets a lot of votes.

 

As a practical matter, what Tucker Carlson thinks about U.S.–Russia relations and the situation in Ukraine has not mattered very much, except maybe to Jon Stewart and SNL and other media figures and media obsessives. And maybe it should matter even less. Republican candidates spend a great deal of time obsessing about the wrongs inflicted on them by left-leaning media and absolutely cowering from right-wing media, fearing criticism on Fox News or AM radio more than they fear almost anything else. There is reason to believe that their resentment of the one is largely profitless and their fear of the other largely baseless.

 

I wonder who will bell that cat.