Fox News fired its top star, Tucker Carlson, for his spectacular series of miscalculations and Dumb Don-like comments on women. The price to Fox was an almost $800 million defamation settlement and a looming case for $2.6 billion. All this for a zero media presence like Carlson. He had to go.
As always, it’s just the numbers. Carlson topped out at a measly 3.6 million viewers, 1.1% of the U.S. population. By contrast, half a century ago Walter Cronkite had 28 million viewers, 8X Carlson, or 14% of the population then. Effectively 13X the viewership. Teeny Tiny Tucker.
In Cronkite’s day, information costs were much, much higher and information velocities were incomparably slower. TV networks were stupefyingly expensive and thus, few in number. It was a different age with only a small fraction of today's viewing options. So, way more viewers for each.
What happened over half a century to make Carlson such a teeny tiny nonentity?
On the Information Cost-Velocity Curve today, every person is a TV station, as police forces worldwide are discovering to their cost. And soon, every thing will be a TV station. Hundreds of billions of them. Each with the power of a data center at nano scale. The mainframe-to-PC-to-smartphone migration on steroids.
The ICVC turns legacy TV networks like Fox into idle backwaters where nothing is happening.
Where is everything happening? New media like TikTok and Twitter leverage the TV station that every person has become. Charlie D’Amelio is so far out on the ICVC that she has over 150 million TikTok followers, a whopping 42X Teeny Tiny Tucker's and 45% of the U.S. population. Teeny Tiny counts for nothing. But will end up costing Fox at least $2 billion in lawsuits.
On Twitter, President Obama has an audience 37X Teeny Tiny’s. Did Rupert Murdoch not notice?
Fox is living in the Stone Age, not the Information Age. It is a neolithic artifact. Investors, pay attention.
And Teeny Tiny Tucker? He lives in a half-century old past—the time of his birth—and is jumping around on a tiny stage with a tiny audience.
He is still the baby that he was then.
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