Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s tweet announcing his plans to launch a new show on Twitter has been viewed over 126 million times in just a few days.
Carlson’s Tuesday tweet captioned “We’re back” amassed over 100 million views within 24 hours. The video embedded in the tweet had been viewed over 26 million times by the time this article was published.
A news media veteran of 30 years, Carlson worked at The Weekly Standard, CNN, and MSNBC, among others, before becoming a political commentator with Fox News in 2009. His “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show first aired in 2016, and went on to become the highest-rated primetime show on cable news. Carlson parted ways with Fox News on April 24.
In the three-minute video, Carlson expressed his frustration with the legacy news media, the repercussions of talking about subjects that are deemed off-limits, and the problem with establishment fact-checking.
“You often hear people say the news is full of lies,” Carlson said. “But most of the time, that’s not exactly right. Much of what you see on television or read in the New York Times is, in fact, true in the literal sense.”
“Lawyers would be willing to sign off on it,” he added. “But that doesn’t make it true.”
Carlson went on to claim that the news prepared by many media outlets for public consumption is a kind of fabrication.
“Facts have been withheld on purpose, along with proportion and perspective,” Carlson said. “You are being manipulated.
“How does that work? Let’s see. If I tell you that a man has been unjustly arrested for armed robbery, that is not, strictly speaking, a lie. He may have been framed,” he explained. “But if I don’t mention the fact that the same man has been arrested for the same crime six times before, am I really informing you? No, I’m not. I’m misleading you, and that’s what the news media are doing in every story that matters, every day of the week, every week of the year.”
He then implied that this isn’t always the fault of journalists, who may not be at liberty to exert their profession to the fullest within the legacy media apparatus. “There are always limits,” he said. “And you know that if you bump up against those limits often enough, you will be fired for it.
“That’s not a guess—it’s guaranteed. Every person who works in English-language media understands that,” Carlson said. “It’s utterly corrupting.”
Carlson stressed the importance of free speech, calling it the “fundamental prerequisite for democracy.”
“You can’t have a free society if people aren’t allowed to say what they think is true,” he said.
Carlson explained that, in his opinion, Twitter is the last big online platform remaining that allows free speech.
“Twitter has long served as the place where our national conversation incubates and develops. Twitter is not a partisan site. Everybody’s allowed here, and we think that’s a good thing,” he said.
“Starting soon, we’ll be bringing a new version of the show we’ve been doing for the last six-and-a-half years to Twitter,” Carlson said, promising to bring the audience “some other things too”—but without going into details.
Carlson on Twitter
Twitter CEO Elon Musk replied to Carlson’s tweet by stating that the former Fox News host would need to adhere to the same Twitter rules as other users.
“On this platform, unlike the one-way street of broadcast, people are able to interact, critique and refute whatever is said,” Musk wrote. “And, of course, anything misleading will get @CommunityNotes”—which is Twitter’s own open and collaborative “fact checking” system.
Musk also stressed that no deal of any kind had been made between Twitter and Carlson.
“I hope that many others, particularly from the left, also choose to be content creators on this platform,” he added.
On Wednesday, Musk invited former CNN anchor Don Lemon to host his show on Twitter.
