Huge news these days in the media world, with Tucker Carlson, the most popular figure in the history of cable news, I believe, out at Fox, and Don Lemon–a marginal personality whom I have never seen in action–fired by CNN. But that is not all: Disney has also fired Nate Silver from the 538 franchise that Silver founded years ago.
Nate Silver Out at 538, ABC News as Disney Layoffs Hit ABC News – The Hollywood Reporter https://t.co/Rb6bZN5jEz
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) April 25, 2023
This has to do, evidently, with layoffs at the money-bleeding Disney Corporation, whose wokeness hasn’t helped at the box office. And 538 may have contributed to Disney’s losses:
Iger's Folly: $50M-75M of losses? For partisanship?
Apr 2018 – "Potential buyers of FiveThirtyEight were told it was losing about $6 million annually on revenue of about $3 million, according to one person familiar with the sale discussions."https://t.co/0f6RTnfx2F via @WSJ
— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) April 25, 2023
Expenses at three times revenue? Not exactly a conservative approach to business.
Still, it is stunning: Silver founded 538 as a web site quite a few years ago, and to my knowledge the site is not significantly associated with anyone else.
Some years ago, Silver attacked me and I had no choice but to embarrass him, as he did not understand the relevant data. But I don’t care about that. My impression is that he is not an especially far-out leftist. But I don’t much care about that, either.
My point is that people in the media world either have value, or they don’t. The big organizations, whether conglomerates like Disney/ABC, TV networks like Fox News or CNN, or newspapers like the New York Times, have nothing like the power that they once did. They exist because people like to read, or hear from, a finite number of reporters and commentators. Like Tucker Carlson and Nate Silver. And if the conglomerates lose those people, they have little to offer.
The news organization adds surprisingly little value, because people can access the information they want in many ways. Thus, Megyn Kelly has gone from a broadcast career to a sensationally popular podcast where she reaches millions of listeners. In her own way, without corporate interference. Bari Weiss is far better known and more influential now, as a podcaster and writer on Substack, than she ever was as a reporter for the New York Times. Chris Rufo has no corporate affiliation that I know of, but he reaches millions through Twitter and other outlets. There are many more examples: Joe Rogan influences vastly more people than, say, Paul Krugman, and perhaps more than whoever might currently be hosting the CBS, NBC or ABC nightly news. I couldn’t name one of those “mainstream” anchors if you offered me a million dollars apiece.
Many more examples could be multiplied. Here in Minnesota, people say that the Minneapolis Star Tribune dominates local news. Possibly. But the Strib’s electronic audience is almost exactly equal to that of my own upstart organization. And our audience is growing rapidly. Here at Power Line, my partners and I are more widely read, in total page views, than all but a handful of national and regional newspaper columnists. 1.7 billion page views add up.
So my message is an optimistic one: if you have something to say, and you think people want to hear you, go for it. You don’t need cable TV, newspapers, television and radio networks, and so on. There is a world of communication out there, to which those who monitor from the “top” are oblivious.
The establishment media constantly try to cover up stories–the Russia collusion hoax, Joe Biden’s selling out to foreign governments, the insane cost and unreliability of “green” energy, Biden’s senility, and so on–but people find out about these things. How can that be?
It is because most people no longer rely on establishment media institutions for their information. They look to people they trust, on Twitter, on Substack, on the “Free Internet,” and so on. The free media are the future. That, I think, is where Tucker Carlson and others are headed. Corporate sponsorship is more or less irrelevant.
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