Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News. If he wants to, I think he can build as large an audience as he had there, or a larger one, independently — à la Joe Rogan. I would bet that he owns the television studios from which he does his nightly show and the Fox Nation show, which features lengthy interviews. If he wants to launch a big independent subscription broadcast, it’s probably only a matter of redecorating.
Fox has plentiful reasons to believe that the 8 p.m. nightly time slot is the valuable property, not the talent that occupies it. But I doubt anyone will drive as many viewers or as much conversation as did Tucker. Tucker’s fall at Fox is almost certainly not just the result of whatever Fox is going through legally at the moment. It was also assisted by the left’s ad boycott against Tucker’s show, the largest audience in nightly cable television. A subscription service would eliminate any possibility of this.
The biggest dynamic now in media and politics is still insiders vs. outsiders. And consistently Tucker Carlson is taking a more outsider view — on the Ukraine war, the opioid epidemic, immigration, public-health diktats, the intelligence community, and so on. His being shut out at Fox News will be seen as a reconsolidation for the Establishment, even on the Republican side. His likely re-emergence in the world of independent broadcasters will further consolidate that audience as well.