Conservative writer David French spoke with Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin for this week’s The Interview podcast, and made an observation about the influence and reach of Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, whom he referred to as “essentially a replacement-level host.”
Tucker Carlson is a frequent topic of news and social media anger or angst for the left and the media at large, and in fact, is exhaustively covered each week on competitor CNN. But French says that Tucker may not be the arch-villain he’s seen as, pulling strings or influencing the Republican party to quite the degree that those contrary outlets seem to believe.
“Let’s be very real about one thing,” French said. “Ninety percent of the reason why Tucker is popular with conservatives is because he’s on Fox at 8 p.m.”
French and McLaughlin discussed Fox’s ratings, which are the highest in cable news, and said that Tucker doesn’t give a lot of “deviation above replacement.” In fact, he argued, you might be able to pull even more from the timeslot without him.
“We have to understand that Tucker is essentially a replacement-level Fox prime time host,” he said. “So you could pop Tucker out, plop in Ben Shapiro and you might have more numbers, to be honest. Part of it is, I think we overemphasize Tucker because he has a
They noted that Carlson has been beaten by Fox’s afternoon show The Five routinely lately, and for the entire month of October, an unprecedented situation for the network. “And nobody in America is talking about The Five-ism,” he said a bit jokingly. “So part of it is pretty dramatically exaggerated, to be honest.”
“And you know, one of the things one of the advantages I have because I’m not living in the Beltway and the Acela corridor — I live in the heart of Red America — my neighborhood is 85% red, and the number of people you interact with sort of in this basic kind of grassroots Republican world who are imbibing this very statist populism is really low,” said French in addressing the essential political philosophy behind Tucker Carlson’s show and any alleged movement in which he might have a leadership role.
In fact, and despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, French thinks that Glenn Youngkin’s success in Virginia shows that Trumpism itself isn’t quite the force it is assumed to be. He characterized Youngkin as being almost Virginia’s version of Mitt Romney and said those voters would be very surprised to hear Tucker Carlson described as an influential voice in their own politics.
French did note that, while perhaps not the policies or actual ideology of that “statist populism&
That’s something he talked about in-depth for the podcast, which you can hear and read about in full here.