He was working for the man.

I don’t care what side of the political spectrum you’re on, that’s not what this is about. This is about the fact that Tucker Carlson was an employee and now he lost his job. As Bob Dylan so famously sang forty years ago, we’ve all gotta serve somebody.

So if you go back in internet history, everybody with a gig jumped ship for fame and fortune elsewhere. Sasha Frere-Jones left the “New Yorker” for Genius.com. A dumb move. He soon left and then ended up at the L.A. “Times,” where he was quickly let go, supposedly for expensing 5k at a strip club. Heard about Jones recently? No, crickets.

And then one of the two deans of tech reporting, David Pogue, left the “New York Times” for Yahoo! His word was godhead, now he’s barely on the radar screen. The “Times” ultimately gave him a new gig, barely noticeable, and he appears sometimes on “CBS Sunday Morning,” but his profile is gone. This would be like the star pitcher of the Yankees going to play Japanese ball for the money and then trying to come back after the Yankee roster had been rebuilt. You’re older, the world has adjusted, there’s really no place for you, except maybe as a coach, or the bat boy.

And then there’s Kara Swisher. Who worked her way up to the “New York Times,” had a prominent podcast with the Gray Lady, and thought her stature and reach were a result of her talents as opposed to the imprimatur of the “New York Times.” She started a podcast with “Vox” that got so little traction they reduced its frequency, and as for the Pivot podcast, the star is Scott Galloway, who cannot only do it by himself, he is doing so, with multiple podcasts a week sans Kara.

So Tucker Carlson believes he’s a world-beater, that he’s in control.

But the company is in control, never think you’re bigger than the company. All those bigwigs getting canned for sexual harassment… I mean why risk your gig, you know the rules, but they think the rules don’t apply to them.

Remember when Bill O’Reilly was the evil big daddy?

Well, he got canned and has a podcast, and I’d quote the numbers, but I reach more people every day than that dude, you might know his name, but you haven’t heard of anything he’s done in years.

Ditto Roger Ailes. Before he died he was not only a pariah, he was an irrelevant pariah with no audience.

Because the audience belonged to Fox, not him.

And then there’s Heather Cox Richardson. 

Now if you’ve been following Substack, you know it’s in financial trouble. How bad are things over at the newsletter company? Substack asked its writers to invest! That’d be like you paying to work at the department store. Or paying Universal to release your music. Why would you do that? Why does Substack need the money? Because it was a bad business idea!

You did see that Buzzfeed News folded. Had nothing to do with its reach and impact, but everything to do with money. You’ve got to know, these new enterprises are not there for their employees’ health, and certainly not for their contributors’ and freelancers’ health, but for the owners/investors’ financial health. And if the numbers don’t work… They’ll lean the company down, lay employees off until the numbers do make sense or they’ll pull the plug completely. They don’t care about you, you’ve got to care about you.

As for Heather Cox Richardson, she’s hosted by Substack, but she doesn’t need the company. Because her success is all based on her. And the paradigm she employees is not evidenced elsewhere. Academic explains the day’s events with a sense of history, written in a fashion that’s palatable to the hoi polloi. And that’s a big deal, most academic writing is piss-poor, as is judicial writing. The facts are there, but unless you’re in the field you don’t care.

In other words, build it yourself and you own it.

This is the opposite of the classic rock game. You needed the label to build it. You couldn’t build it alone, no classic rock act made it as an independent. They were working for the man, but the contract ended, and now they’re reaping the rewards on live tours, assuming they’re alive. You can’t predict the future. Then again, the artists knew they didn’t own their recorded work, but the public perceived that they did. As in the songs were identified with the artist, not the company.

And today you don’t even need to be with the record company to succeed. And if you build it yourself, you own everything, especially the names of your fans and how to reach them, you are in control.

Tucker Carlson’s success was positively old school. Without a Fox evening slot, he meant little, or shall I say he reached little, as he will reach little today.

Sure, he could enter politics, but as many bridges as Donald Trump has burned, Carlson has burned more. And Trump has more charisma, but Carlson is smarter. Ignorance is not a sales point for Carlson. Which is why he’s scarier, he knows exactly what he is doing.

So, Carlson’s future is in the news/commentary business.

No other outlet is going to hire him, he’s radioactive. Maybe Newsmax or OAN but that’d be like dropping from the major league to a AA farm club. You can play, but you’re off the radar of most people and others don’t take you seriously.

Carlson could write a book. But not the book people want to read, the one where he owns the truth revealed in the Dominion discovery. His thoughts about Trump, et al. But that would be career suicide. Furthermore, despite all the hype books are not like records, except for a very few, they reach almost nobody. There’s the hype, and then nothing. And if you’ve got anything to say, it comes out in the hype, so why read the book. You own the news cycle for a couple of days and then you’re done.

Oh, you could start over, but with a fraction of the audience, like Glenn Beck. But Beck’s empire is not growing in any significant way, it’s positively niche.

So, Carlson is screwed. He thought he was bigger than the company, bigger than Rupert Murdoch, he thought he was in control. But he was not. If he’d been a student of the game…but history is in the rearview mirror with all these cats…he would have looked back to Barry Diller’s tenure at Fox. Diller did the undoable, he created a successful fourth TV network. And then Barry went to Murdoch and asked for a piece of the company. Rupert told him there was only one owner at Fox, and Diller left.

Now Diller is a smart businessman and ultimately became a billionaire, but…owning dating sites and a motley crew of internet companies isn’t very sexy. Barry did it his way, but other than his money…what is there to admire?

No, Carlson is about impact.

And impact is always more important than money. Really, it’s all about power. But you want to build that power for yourself if you want to skate on it forever, otherwise you’re beholden to the owner, or the corporate board, you can’t be uncompromised. Sure, the news outlet can make you a star overnight, but once you’re gone… Heard anything about Kara DioGuardi recently? She was a judge on “American Idol” for two seasons. If it was about her, if she drove the ratings, if she was indispensable, she’d still have her job or have a high profile elsewhere. But you don’t even see Kara’s name anymore, never mind know where she is.

Now you’re entitled to employ your own strategy. Take the money and run. Sign up with the major label and try to become an instant hit. That’s your option. Or you could build it yourself. But building it yourself happens slower than ever, and you’re not entitled to bitch about it, it’s a bad look. You build your audience, it keeps you alive, and that’s all you get. No one gets to be top of mind with the entire population anymore. Unless they’re Trump or they kill someone. People don’t even think about Biden every day, and he’s President!

So when you read all the news articles about Tucker’s future… Know that they’re written by those working for the man, their perspective is limited. Sure, they can delineate the possibilities, but they haven’t got any idea what goes on in the independent sphere, and their goal is to satiate the owner, not the reader. Their goal is to keep their job. So their perspective is off.

Tucker Carlson has been marginalized, permanently. Not only did he lose his gig, Rupert showed him who was boss. And it wasn’t Tucker. Carlson was just a pawn in Rupert’s game, and he was easy to sacrifice, to save the operation.

Yes, it’s a good look for Rupert. He can say he’s not passive, he cut out the cancer. Believe it or not, but one thing is for sure, Tucker Carlson has been excised and he didn’t even see it coming.

This is as high as Carlson will ever go. Audiences are declining. Assuming you have one to begin with. Those viewers are Fox’s, not Carlson’s, and he’s going to find this out if and when he decides to start over.

I know who my readers are. Carlson has no idea who his viewers are. He’d be starting from scratch. Doing it independently. But Tucker’s a corporate guy. He’s got no reasonable options.

He’s like Joe McCarthy, or Father Coughlin. A lightning rod most would like to see silenced. His constituency is minor. I mean even if you like what Tucker says, his smartest kid in the classroom who wears a suit when everyone else is in dungarees who thinks he knows everything and talks down to others in the process act is not endearing, it’s off-putting. You can get the same message from somebody else, who is warmer. Even Sean Hannity! Who those on both the right and left say they like personally. But not Tucker Carlson. He can continue to run for school president but he’s never going to win, he burned too many bridges, almost no one likes him. Unless he was only in it for the money, all one can say is he played the game wrong, didn’t even understand the game he was playing, didn’t know corporate rules, he can only blame himself.

But he’ll never own that.