The big media news yesterday was that Tucker Carlson is re-starting his colossally popular show on … wait for it … Twitter. Corporate media promptly reacted to the news by freaking out. In the clip below, you’ll see the first example of corporate media’s take: it’s right-wing extremist.

GUEST: “Will anybody be able to police what Carlson says? Or is this the point? It’s just a free for all?”

HUMAN POTATO: “I think this is the point, this IS a free for all… this move by Tucker may cement the idea that Twitter is a right-wing website.

https://twitter.com/alx/status/1656135457506484224?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Brian Stelter was reacting to yesterday’s video clip announcing Tucker’s new show, which will be broadcast on Twitter’s brand-new subscription service. Over at CNN Business, they weren’t even trying to appear unbiased, labeling Tucker a “right wing extremist” in the lead graf of a straight news piece:

Well, I guess it’s fair, in a sense, since Tucker started the name-calling. In his video, Tucker said that traditional news outlets — corporate media — are liars, more defined by what they intentionally and deceivingly DON’T tell us:

You often hear people say the news is full of lies … At the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie. A lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind. Facts have been withheld on purpose. Along with proportion and perspective. You are being manipulated.
How does that work? … If [I say a man has been unjustly arrested] and I don’t mention the same man has been arrested for the same crime six times before, am I really informing you? No, I’m misleading you.
… The rule of what you CAN’T say defines everything.

https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1656037032538390530?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The takes range from white-hot outrage from the Left, who’d hoped that Tucker would languish forever in contractual Hades, to marveling at Musk’s unbelievable coup, somehow stealing the highest-watched regular news programming in history from Fox onto the Twitter platform.

This potentially signals a seismic shift in the media landscape. If Tucker’s new show is successful, which seems likely, who or what else could move to Twitter, to enjoy the independence and have control of one’s own destiny?

There’s a fancy word for this phenomenon: disintermediation. Getting rid of the middleman. Since corporate media outlets no longer do original investigative reporting, they all get their news from press releases and local outlets, and Tucker can do the exact same thing.

Twitter isn’t slowing down. Musk also announced some pretty significant new Twitter features yesterday, including fully-encrypted (allegedly) direct messages and voice/video calls to other twitter users without needing a phone number.

What do you suppose a completely-unlimited Tucker is going to look like? Things are happening fast.

? In related news, the Post Millennial ran a story yesterday headlined, “BREAKING: Carlson Was Told by a Member of the Fox Board That He Was Taken Off the Air as Part of the Dominion Settlement, Per Tucker’s Legal Team.”

You may recall that we speculated about this possibility, given the timing between the Dominion settlement and Tucker’s firing. The fact that a board member admitted to Tucker that the anchor was fired as a settlement term gave Tucker’s lawyers just what they needed.

In other words, Tucker was not fired for cause, which almost certainly breached his employment agreement.

The Post Millennial said that Carlson’s lawyers argued in a recent letter to Fox that Carlson’s noncompete provision, which would’ve run through 2025, is no longer valid, alleging several Fox employees — including “Rupert Murdoch himself” — intentionally broke promises or other “material representations” with “reckless disregard for the truth.”

In my commercial litigation practice, I often deal with, and litigate over, what we call “restrictive covenants” including non-competes. From what I can tell, I think Tucker is on solid legal ground