The advertiser exodus from Tucker Carlson’s white nationalism is gaining steam. Coincidentally, last night, Carlson abandoned his usual race baiting in favor of political hate mongering.
As we’ve previously written, the Tucker Carlson Tonight show has been losing sponsors in the wake of his monologue claiming that immigration makes the country “poorer, dirtier, and more divided.” As of now, the count is up to at least 19 advertisers who have parted ways with the show.
Fox News claims not to care. On Monday night, Carlson doubled down and played the free speech martyr:
Those who won’t shut up get silenced. You’ve seen it a million times. It happens all the time. The enforcers scream “racist!” on Twitter until everyone gets intimidated, and changes the subject to the Russia investigation or some other distraction.
It’s a tactic. A well-worn one. Nobody thinks it's real. And it won’t work with this show. We’re not intimidated. We plan to try to say what’s true until the last day. And the truth is, unregulated mass immigration has badly hurt this country’s natural landscape.
Fox News issued a similarly defiant statement:
We cannot and will not allow voices like Tucker Carlson to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts from the likes of Moveon.org, Media Matters and Sleeping Giants.
Attempts were made last month to bully and terrorize Tucker and his family at their home. He is now once again being threatened via Twitter by far left activist groups with deeply political motives.
While we do not advocate boycotts, these same groups never target other broadcasters and operate under a grossly hypocritical double standard given their intolerance to all opposing points of view.
Despite those stances, it just so happens that Carlson avoided the subject of immigration last night, as you can see in the Fox transcript. Time will tell if this is a permanent change or one that lasts just long enough to woo back advertisers. Or it's (remotely) possible this was just a consequence of yesterday's news cycle, though I can't recall ever seeing Carlson spend so much time on the Russia investigation.
As Media Matters noted, Fox was already facing declining revenue on its prime time shows. So it stands to reason, the Fox suits would not be eager for the trend to accelerate.
This blog does not endorse advertiser boycotts as we believe there are better ways to deal with Fox. However, this one may be having an effect. The thing is, though, the divisive, hate-mongering, partisanship remains undiminished whether the talk is about immigration or something else. The screen grabs below give you an idea of what was on the Tucker Carlson Tonight menu last night.
HuffPost is keeping track of Carlson’s fleeing advertisers.
“unregulated mass immigration has badly hurt this country’s natural landscape.”
I’m just not sure what he’s getting at because I live on the border, and I’ve noticed something quite large that has badly hurt the natural landscape, it is a very tall metal structure designed to keep people out of our country. It is a rust-colored wall and I would never call it beautiful.