Three career lessons from Tucker Carlson’s defenestration

Love him or hate him, there’s probably something you can learn from Tucker Carlson

Photo by Rubaitul Azad on Unsplash

I’m not exactly pro-Tucker Carlson, but neither am I as fanatically anti-Carlson as many American progressives are.

To summarise for Australians who have no idea who I’m talking about, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson was until recently Fox News’ biggest star and host of Tucker Carlson Tonight, a prime-time program widely watched by both Republican and Democrat voters.

It’s an article of faith among university-educated American Leftists that Carlson is dangerously right-wing, indeed “far right-wing”. But that seems a somewhat simplistic descriptor for somebody who authored a book entitled Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. (In case it’s not clear from the title, the book lamented the pauperisation of the US’s middle class.) It’s also worth noting that, even prior to his neo-con conversion experience on September 11, 2001, Christopher Hitchens was a huge fan of Carlson.

Speaking of neo-cons, Tucker is one of the very few prominent American journalists willing to criticise the adventurism of his nation’s military-industrial complex. Indeed, one of the theories floating around at the time of writing is that Carlson’s ouster was at least partly down to him being too much of a loose cannon on issues such as Ukraine.    

But I don’t want this to be the eleventy gazillionth article arguing that Carlson is a genocidal white supremacist, or a noble tribune of the people, or some bizarre combination thereof. I simply want to tease out some learnings from his rise, fall and potential comeback.

1.     Your employer will unhesitatingly throw you under the bus for any reason, or sometimes even for no reason at all  
Lots of people like to believe they have more than a business relationship with their employer. They often believe, despite the abundant evidence of their lying eyes, that their bond with their boss resembles one they might have with a friend or family member. But as I touched on in my last Substack, it’s comforting but almost always delusional to think that the organisation currently employing you has your back.

Carlson reportedly socialised regularly with Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. He has made them many millions of dollars over the last decade and a half. At least in public, he has always been a good company man. In short, Carlson had no reason to believe the Murdochs would abruptly turn on him. But turn on him they did.  

At the time of writing, there are a plethora of theories floating around about why Carlson got the arse. My theory – albeit not one I can provide any convincing evidence for – is that Rupe sacked him just to show the world that he could. It was, to use the appropriate corporate terminology, a dick-swinging power move.

Murdoch’s faithful retainers seem to have taken it that way and have sallied forth into print to champion the inexplicable but entirely justified termination. Andrew Bolt – who appears to have partly modelled himself on Carlson – inevitably churned out a Herald-Sun column lavishing praise on Murdoch père et fils and sticking the boot into his dispatched colleague. (Do Murdoch’s minions never consider the possibility that the day may come when they too are fed to the wolves, just as so many of their former co-workers have been?)

In full school-marm mode, Bolt averred, “The message is now out. If you threaten your station or your newspaper by going nuts, know this: you’re never bigger than the media organisation that made you.”

Hmmm. I’d argue the message that’s now out is that only a fool would assume the business they work for will feel the slightest sense of obligation to them.    

2.     Glamorous industries have a dark side
Even before their business models collapsed around 15 years ago, media organisations were notorious for treating their workers poorly. I once believed this was some weird pathology unique to the fourth estate. But now I’m older and wiser, I realise it is par for the course in any industry with a nearly endless supply of willing recruits.    

Here’s how these industries work. You make people feel they’ve won life’s lottery merely by landing a (low-paid) job in the industry. You then continue to pay early-career to mid-career workers peanuts. There is a chance – at best, a 10 per cent chance – that a modestly renumerated foot soldier will rise up the ranks to either become a star or move into management. But most of the time, the foot soldiers will either be pushed out of the industry or voluntarily decide to leave it after 10-20 years (when they realise it’s a lot harder to live on a pittance when you’re 45, or even 35, than it is when you’re 25).  

This churn-and-burn model works exceptionally well for employers in glamour industries. They get a lot of talented and ambitious – often ruthlessly ambitious – twentysomethings and thirtysomethings to bust a gut for them for minimal cost. And when that cohort ages out of the industry, there’s no shortage of eager 21-year-olds waiting in the wings to replace them.

But what about that lucky 10 per cent, I hear you ask. What about the Herald-Sun employee who goes from being a humble junior reporter to being Andrew Bolt? There’s obviously no doubt that if you were to go into a glamour industry, you would be one of the fortunate few rather than one of the mass of losers frantically attempting to forge a second, better-paid career in your early forties.

OK then, let’s say you do become a prominent opinion columnist or newspaper editor. For a time, you will get paid vastly more, and treated much more respectfully, than your foot soldier colleagues. (Carlson was reportedly on US$20 million a year.) But as anyone who has ever watched an episode of Succession (or read Mumbrella) will understand, it’s near inevitable that you too will eventually fall out of favour with the powers-that-be and be brutally dispatched.

This brings me to my final point…

3.     You need to build your personal brand (ideally without antagonising your employer)
Fox’s ratings have taken a big hit since Tucker was placed on gardening leave (at the time of writing he’s still technically employed). But Murdoch loyalists have been quick to point out that Fox has bounced back after the departure of other big names, such as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Megyn Kelly. If they are feeling particularly spiteful, these Murdoch loyalists will then point out that these individuals have been reduced to working in *sniff* the digital space.

As our academic friends say, there’s a lot to unpack here. So, let’s take it one point at a time.

In many glamour industries, there is a tension between building your personal brand and doing things that will make your employer money (or at least not cost them money).

A well-publicised example of this is the tweeting activities of journalists. If you’re a twentysomething journalist, you have every incentive to build your profile by making provocative pronouncements on social media and, where possible, getting into Twitter feuds with high-profile individuals. (If you aspire to be, say, the left-wing version of Andrew Bolt, it’s not going to do your cause any harm to be constantly denouncing the actual Andrew Bolt. If he then takes the bait and fires back with a tweet attacking you, your status is elevated – after all, you’re now the guy or gal who ‘owned’ Bolt on Twitter.)

But if you’re an employer of twentysomething journalists, you’d much prefer they confine themselves to promoting your media organisation’s content and making anodyne observations. You don’t want to be dealing with a defamation action or having to explain why you employed someone who once tweeted, “All straight white men should be castrated then sent to labour camps”.

The Twitter travails of media organisations in recent years aren’t of much interest to non-journalists. But plenty of people who aren’t journalists and who don’t even work in glamour industries still have to work out how to balance their and their employer’s interests. And even more importantly, determine how much of their success is down to the platform their employer provides and how much of it is down to their own talents.

(The classic cautionary tale here is the person who is making big money at, for instance, a professional services or law firm. This individual convinces themselves they are a genius who could earn even more money if they hung out their own shingle. They then quickly discover that past and potential clients are much less interested in returning their calls now that they are no longer employed by a prestigious professional services or law firm.)  

Even Tucker’s harshest critics find it difficult to argue he’s not good at what he does. That’s why several TV networks, including overtly left-leaning ones, have employed him over the course of his career. And why he’s already been flooded with lucrative job offers, albeit mainly from newish digital media organisations. And why the Murdochs are doing everything possible to make sure Carlson will be damaged goods before he’s released from his contract. (The nightmare scenario for the Murdochs is that Carlson has become bigger than the media organisation that employs him and that a large part of his audience will follow him to wherever he pops up next.)

It’s still the case that television stars loom larger in the popular consciousness than digital media ones. I presume more Americans would recognise Anderson Cooper or Whoopi Goldberg than Ben Shapiro or Steven Crowder. In that narrow sense, ‘going digital’ may be a backwards step for an erstwhile TV star.

But in every other sense, it’s the smart move. If you own a digital media organisation, you don’t have to worry about getting moved on by the proprietor because you are the proprietor. Even better, you’ll probably make more money than you did as a TV talking head. (Over time, if not immediately.)

Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Megyn Kelly all seem to be doing well for themselves in the digital space. The money the likes of Shapiro and Crowder make dwarfs that of most, possibly all, TV stars. And while the money and influence someone like Joe Rogan possesses doesn’t yet rival the money and influence Rupert or Lachlan Murdoch have, the Joe Rogan Experience looks like the future. In contrast, cable news increasingly looks like the past.