Tucker Carlson’s Data-Driven Demagoguery

The Fox Network star is a ratings crack-head, pandering to minute-by-minute data on his audience’s basest fears.

In April 2017, Tucker Carlson’s star at Fox News rose to the top slot, the covered 8:00pm prime time hour that had just been vacated by Bill O’Reilly. He had one challenge: how to build a loyal audience while distinguishing himself from fellow host Sean Hannity, then the network’s biggest ratings draw, who was slavishly pro-Trump. Carlson told friends and co-workers he needed a way to connect with the Trump faithful, but without constantly apologizing for the president’s foibles, something he feared would happen often. As The New York Times Nicholas Confessore recounts in meticulous detail in a just-published three-part series, Carlson quickly figured out that the way for him to rise in popularity was by embracing “Trumpism without Trump,” championing the emotional core of Trump’s allure, white panic over America’s changing ethnic makeup.

Reading Confessore’s reporting, one fact jumped out at me: how much Fox and Carlson himself relies on real-time audience data to decide what to cover and how. Think of this as Big Brother surveillance capitalism on steroids. Confessore writes, “To maintain its dominance in the post-Ailes era, the teams working on Fox’s evening…