Fox News Host Tucker Carlson Leaves the Daily Caller
Tucker Carlson is leaving the Daily Caller, the conservative digital publication he co-founded a decade ago, a move that he said would help him focus on his opinion show on Fox News.
“I’m just too absorbed in what I’m doing,” Mr. Carlson said in an interview. “I wasn’t helping in any way, because I’ve got an hour to do every night” on Fox News.
Daily Caller co-founder and publisher Neil Patel said he bought out Mr. Carlson’s roughly one-third stake, but declined to disclose the terms. Mr. Patel now owns a controlling stake in the website—the rest of which is owned by investor and major Republican donor Foster Friess and a few other small investors—which makes the Daily Caller the largest digital-media company owned by a person of color, according to Mr. Patel, who was born in India.
The Daily Caller has prided itself on being more committed to shoe-leather reporting than some of its competitors on the right and has landed scoops that proved damaging to the current administration—such as the news that Michael Flynn, then an adviser to President-elect Trump, was lobbying for a company with ties to the Turkish government. It is the only conservative outlet among Facebook Inc.’s nine U.S. fact-checking partners, which rate and review content on the platform. At the same time, it came under scrutiny a few years ago for its hiring of writers with ties to white nationalism.
Mr. Carlson’s departure from the publication is likely to help the Daily Caller’s brand mature, according to Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, a digital-media trade association, because it will separate it from Mr. Carlson’s “high-profile, strong and at times polarizing opinions.”
Mr. Carlson’s opinion show on Fox News, which he has hosted since 2016, is scoring record ratings and making him a daily lightning rod for controversy.
Messrs. Carlson, 51 years old, and Patel, 50, who were roommates at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., began publishing the Daily Caller in 2010 as a kind of right-wing alternative to the Huffington Post, with $3 million in backing from Mr. Friess. Mr. Patel handled the business side, while Mr. Carlson—a former print journalist who by then was a well-known cable-news pundit, having joined Fox News after stints at CNN and MSNBC—served as editor in chief until 2016.
A key aspect of the co-founders’ vision was to inject more original reporting into a right-leaning digital-media ecosystem that was largely made up of opinion—even if that meant making life difficult for Republicans sometimes.
The site, which has a staff of about 80 and makes most of its money from advertising, drew about 5 million monthly unique visitors in April, according to Comscore—a bit less than Breitbart News, but more than the Drudge Report. Mr. Patel said the publication’s internal analytics put traffic between 15 million and 20 million unique visitors a month.
“The only reason the Daily Caller still exists is because the guy running it is one of the very rare conservative intellectuals who understands business,” Mr. Carlson said of Mr. Patel. “There’s no magic secret, as far as I know, other than he keeps costs in line with revenue.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fox-news-host-tucker-carlson-leaves-the-daily-caller-11591804588
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