- Aug 3, 2012
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I was listening to a podcast recently and was reminded that, once upon a time, Tucker Carlson intended for The Daily Caller to rival the NY Times and had gone so far as to admonish conservatives and conservative media for focusing too much on commentary and not enough on reporting news.
"Why aren't there 25 Fox Newses? There oughta be. Don't just comment on the news. Dig it up and make it."
I've made the same argument here many times - that for all the money and power that exists on the right, they should be able to build rivals to mainstream news and media organizations. But they don't. I've illustrated this fact by pointing to the Ad Fontes Media Bias chart and the gaping hole that is the "Fact reporting" section on the right half of the top of the pyramid. Nearly all of the mainstream liberal outlets live on the left half of that section, while the right half is nearly empty. Virtually all of the popular conservative outlets are farther down the pyramid, where the focus is on opinion and the reliability is questionable.
Carlson was obviously wrong, though. The key to success isn't in reporting facts - failures of newsrooms across the country are testament to that, because, as he rightfully pointed out, reporting is hard and expensive. It also doesn't have much of a market on the right. As he discovered, the key to success is going even further, even harder into opinion and unreliability. Polemics is where the money's at.
