Fox News’s top-rated host, Tucker Carlson, offered his take Wednesday night on what went wrong for the Republicans in Tuesday’s midterm elections. While he acknowledged anger over possible abortion restrictions and some poor choices by Republican leaders was a factor, Carlson zoned in on what he claims is Democrat control of the media and the Republicans’ inability to get their message out as the main culprit.
Carlson argued that John Fetterman’s win in Pennsylvania over Mehmet Oz is proof that in fact “candidate quality” doesn’t really matter in elections anymore, arguing that getting your message heard is more important.
“You’ve got to give them credit for at least knowing who they were voting for and they voted for John Fetterman. He won anyway. What does that tell you?” asked Carlson, who fiercely attacked “brain-damaged” Fetterman throughout the election.
“It tells you that in some cases, candidate quality is not actually the most important thing. What is? Well, the mechanics of an election. They matter. In fact, they matter sometimes more than any individual running in the election,” continued Carlson, adding:
The way people vote makes a big difference to the outcome and so, by the way, does access to channels of communication. Why does that matter? Well, because you can say whatever you want, but if no one hears you, you’re not really speaking and that’s the case for Republicans so often, as if Republicans can communicate their message unencumbered on a single cable television channel and a handful of relatively low-traffic websites. That’s it.
Carlson’s comment came a day after Fox News scored massive ratings during their election coverage, not just beating out their cable news competition – combined – but also substantially beating every single broadcast network.
ABC News’s Midterm Election: Your Voice, Your Vote 2022 coverage on Tuesday night led broadcast news with 3.31 million total viewers. NBC News came in second with 3.11 million, while CBS News came in third with 2.56 million total viewers.
How did conservative’s “single cable television channel” – aka Fox News – do? Well, Fox News brought in 7.2 million total viewers for its Democracy 2022: Election Night coverage. MSNBC, meanwhile, had 3.1 million total viewers and CNN landed in third place for the first time with 2.48 million total viewers.
Carlson’s analysis also missed the fact that right-wing viewers have Newsmax and OAN among a slew of online and streaming options, which have only gained in popularity as more and more viewers turn away from television news and other traditional news sources.
As far as the “handful of relatively low-traffic websites” Carlson referred to on the right, Fox News online always lands among the top of the most-trafficked news websites as does the Drudge Report. A quick look at the most listened-to podcasts in the U.S. will also show that Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, and Dan Bongino, among many others, dominate that space and are among the most influential radio hosts in the country.
“The rest of the American media amounts to a gigantic filter designed to distort what Republicans are saying,” continued Carlson on Wednesday night, concluding:
It’s a campaign apparatus and only the Democrats have it. Now you can whine about that (“The media are liberal!”), but it’s not about liberal or conservative. It’s about winning elections and Democrats can win because they have that. If Republicans want to win elections, too, they might spend some money to fix that, to achieve parity.
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