Brian Stelter's view on why the networks are more powerful than their stars.
With the announcement that Fox News's most influential (and most controversial) star, Tucker Carlson, was out of a job, Monday immediately became one of the biggest days for media news in quite a while. Then, less than an hour later, Don Lemon, a CNN personality who had been caught up in his own controversy, tweeted that he, too, was henceforth a free agent. |
The news appeared to take both men by surprise. It certainly sent shock waves through their audiences. |
In a sharp analytic essay, Brian Stelter argues that the intensity of those shock waves is evidence that cable news is way more powerful than the networks' relatively modest ratings would suggest. "This week has proved two things: the might of cable news and the fact that it is ultimately the networks, not the stars, that control it." |
This story he lays out goes far beyond the firings. "We think about cable news all wrong," because we judge it by its official viewership, which represents only a sliver of its true power, he says. "In a darkly humorous way," he adds, the $787.5 million that Fox agreed to pay to settle the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit "is also a testament to cable news's power — the power to destroy a company it sets its sights on." |
Stelter is uniquely qualified to make these arguments. He worked at CNN for nearly nine years, anchoring a weekly program about the media. (He wrote the guest essay while juggling on-camera interviews and calls from highly placed sources.) In addition, he is the author of the forthcoming "Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy." But before Stelter became a cable news personality, he was a newspaper reporter — right here at The New York Times. How he got there is a truly extraordinary story in itself, which you can read about here. |
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