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Tucker Carlson reportedly raising funds for new media company, fmr. staffers jumping ship to join

June 29, 2023 | | Print Article

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is reportedly raising funds to launch his own media company and the “vast majority” of his former staffers are jumping ship at the network to join him for a project that is likely to take social media and America by storm.

Puck News reporter Dylan Byers broke the story on Wednesday noting that staffers laid off or fired by the network are rushing to join Carlson.

“It’s increasingly possible that the Twitter show is a top-of-funnel play for other things Tucker may soon have cooking,” Byers contended, referring to the viral monologues Carlson has been posting on Twitter since leaving Fox News. “In fact, I am told he is raising capital to launch a new company that may yet prove more influential.”

Byers also wrote that Carlson would “certainly benefit from an incongruous number of ultra-wealthy conservative media investors and a scant (though growing) number of opportunities,” and that his new media company could pave the way for a new generation of avid followers.

After eight of Carlson’s former staffers were fired this week, Byers reported, “I am told that the vast majority of these employees will instead reunite with Tucker.”

“The eight remaining members of the Tucker Carlson Tonight team were told Monday that they would need to leave by mid-July, with the option to reapply for new positions. Such an outcome doesn’t seem terribly likely, of course. I am told that the vast majority of these employees will instead reunite with Tucker, who is currently posting Twitter videos from his barn in Maine, with bigger media ambitions afoot,” Puck News reported.

Gregg Re, who was a producer for “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” savaged Fox News after it announced that it will be laying off the remainder of Carlson’s staff after a few more weeks of work on “Fox News Tonight.”

Re tore into Executive Vice President of Primetime Programming Meade Cooper and those replacing Carlson.

“Meade Cooper did not simply fire all of Tucker’s old team,” he charged. ‘It’s important to capture the callousness. First, she let the employees hear about the news of their show’s cancellation from a Fox press release. Then, Meade told the employees to hunt around the Fox website to see if they could maybe find another gig.”

A legal battle is ongoing between Carlson and Fox News currently. The network has issued a “Cease and Desist” letter to the former host, who has millions of viewers on Twitter, asserting that he is in breach of contract. Carlson’s contract does not expire until after the 2024 presidential election, even though Carlson has been permanently taken off the air.

The former Fox News host is evidently unwilling to wait that long no matter how much he is paid. He likely intends to be a driving force in the next election.

“Tucker, the movement’s biggest star in a generation, may be able to test the boundaries. It will certainly represent the latest iteration, for better or worse, in the creator economy. And while it might sound slightly insane, given the differences in their politics and audiences, Tucker’s new media play might—if executed adroitly—serve as a paradigm for a generation of TV news personalities with huge followings and fandoms who remain marooned to their desks amid shrinking audiences. Fox will obviously be paying breathless attention to his developments, despite protestations to the contrary, but so will executives and CNN and MSNBC,” the leftist media outlet stated.

“The near-term damage at Fox, meanwhile, is quite evident. The network’s prime time has lost about a third of its total audience since Tucker’s ouster, though it has shored up some of the leakage by wooing back Tucker-averse advertisers. His absence has also been a blow to the network’s streaming gambit, Fox Nation, which relied on his interview series and controversial documentaries to drive audiences. (Fox Nation has been enduring its own layoffs of late, as The Daily Beast reported earlier this week.) More broadly, Tucker’s own rhetoric about his former employer has made it harder for the network to claw back the Tucker faithful,” Puck News continued.

Carlson’s popularity has only grown since leaving Fox News and if he does indeed start his own media company it could definitely not only be a threat to Fox News, but to the other networks out there.

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