It's mostly about the influence. The success of Tucker Carlson, and the complete refusal of the media to even try to imitate his success, makes it very clear that their motives are not profit-driven:
It's mostly about the influence. The success of Tucker
Carlson, and the complete refusal of the media to even try to imitate his
success, makes it very clear that their motives are not profit-driven:
Tucker Carlson’s prime-time Fox News show, Tucker Carlson
Tonight, has shattered record after record to become the highest rated cable
news program in television history. On any given night, Carlson’s must-watch
program draws nearly 5 million Americans to the television set — a truly
astonishing number we may never see again.
According to an analysis by iSpot.tv, Tucker Carlson accounts
for 16 percent all ad revenue at Fox News. And during the six-month period of
February through July of this year alone, Tucker generated $37.2 million for
Fox News and smashed the competition.
The historic popularity and profitability of Tucker’s show
raises a simple, yet important question: why have none of the major networks,
including Fox, attempted to copy his success? Wouldn’t the fabled “marketplace
of ideas” dictate a certain convergence toward the topics and styles that draw
the biggest audiences?
Perhaps the ad boycotts aimed at Tucker have scared off would-be
copycats. But this simply raises the question of why companies would leave
money on the table by refusing to advertise on television’s most popular cable
news show. Something is off here, and it suggests that the media industry does
not work according to a simple profit motive....
Readers might recall that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the
Washington Post for $250 million. The paper is of course notoriously biased
against Trump, even by the standards of today’s mainstream media. This may be
good for business and it may not be — but ultimately this is not what matters.
What matters is that the Post is directly or indirectly profitable to its
owner, Jeff Bezos. If it lost money, but influenced the public or other
important constituencies in a manner that resulted in greater success for
Amazon (a company 10,000 times its size), it would still be a worthwhile
investment for Bezos.
We can generalize this principle by noting that the
parent-subsidiary model is very common in business. Any given subsidiary does
not have to be profitable in its own right so long as it benefits the parent
company. In the case of The Washington Post, there is a clear “parent company”
in the person of Jeff Bezos. But even absent the existence of a formal parent
company, one can think of the American power structure itself as the true
“parent company” of any sufficiently large and powerful media conglomerate.
Although in some cases this is a metaphor, it captures a very
important feature of how the media and our country function. For a media empire
operating at the highest levels, the influence it wields on the public’s mind
is far more valuable to the ruling power structure than any self-contained
profit that could be generated by optimizing their news product to suit the
taste of the audience.
One need only look at
the fact that despite having a blog with 200 million pageviews, and two of the
most successful crowdfunding campaigns of all-time for their respective
categories, not a single major publisher or media outlet has expressed any
interest in working with me in the last 10 years. Whatever it may be that
drives those companies, it obviously isn't a capitalist profit motive.
