by Don Surber
Michael Schaffer, a senior editor and columnist at Politico Magazine, thought he owned Tucker Carlson by breaking the news that a major publisher dropped plans to publish an anti-Tucker Carlson book.
Schaffer wrote, “the cancellation stems at least in part from the belief that Carlson, once the biggest name on cable, no longer has the kind of cultural footprint to warrant a pricey, complicated book by a top-shelf writer. According to several sources in the publishing industry who have followed the project, a combination of delays and the changes in Carlson’s once dominant media presence caused a loss of enthusiasm on the part of a publishing house going through its own internal tumult.”
That’s as alogical an argument as you can get from outside the CRT classes in the Ivy League or the federal bureaucracy. He is saying that Carlson is too unpopular to sell a book that trashes him.
Way down in Paragraph 11, Schaffer cited the source of his idiocy about the cancelled book by Jason Zengerle — nobody:
Zengerle, my colleague a decade ago at The New Republic and a former Politico Magazine writer, declined comment. So did Carlson. Representatives for Little, Brown and Co. did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But sources at other houses tell me that Zengerle’s agent has been shopping the title to other publishers.
Schaffer didn’t talk to anyone, or to be precise, no one would talk to him.
Well, I didn’t talk to anyone but I did some homework and discovered the obvious. In the post-Trump era, Trump Derangement Syndrome is dead. TDS sufferers can no longer blame Trump for all their problems in life and still look sane.
Many people who once hated him and his conservative supporters now see that Trump had a point. That change reflects nearly four years of watching Biden give away Afghanistan, bring back inflation, eliminate the border and force people to take a shot that wasn’t.
But in DC, Carlson is called a big loser.
Schaffer wrote, “This week, he announced plans for a 15-city arena tour alongside figures like Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a classic example of the sort of thing that can draw huge throngs of the devoted but not register on the media radar of a fragmented country. (Janet Jackson and blink-182 are also on arena tours this summer.)”
But Carlson is drawing media attention. CNN hyperventilated, “Tucker Carlson is going on tour. Ticketmaster is profiting off his hateful rhetoric.” I don’t recall Don Lemon or Rachel Maddow going on a rock star tour.
And while Carlson is packing the halls, Jennifer Lopez just canceled her tour to, um, spend more time with her family. Yea, that’s it. Madonna did the same thing last year.
Well, no one wants to see old singers — except they do and George Strait, 72, just set a new record for attendance at a concert.
By the way, where and when does Schaffer’s tour start?
Buried in Paragraph 10 as the reason for the book cancellation and it isn’t because Zengerle wants to spend more time with his family:
Publishing, meanwhile, saw the political book boom of the Trump years turn into a Biden-era bust. The 46th president and his circle have spawned almost no bestsellers, and neither have their cast of rivals. And to the chagrin of booksellers, the return of the 45th president to electoral contention has not yet brought about another “Trump Bump” of interest in political influencers.
As I said, 46 has shown 45 to be right.
The Washington Post lost half its readers when Trump left office. Its owner, Jeff Bezos, does not know what to do. I suggest more coverage of high school sports with lots of pictures because people are more interested in that stuff than the daily Trump bashing. TDS has become tedious, predictable and unprofitable. The show is over.
Last month, the New York Post reported, “CNN suffered its worst ratings among primetime viewers in the most coveted demographic by advertisers — dealing a gut punch to embattled new boss Mark Thompson.
“The cable channel, which touts itself as the most trusted name in news, drew just 83,000 viewers aged 25 to 54 during the week of May 13-19 from 8 to 11 p.m. — its lowest-rated week since 1991, according to Nielsen.”
Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson has 12.9 million followers on Twitter. That’s 4 times his audience at Fox was when he was No. 1 in cable — all of cable, not just the news channels.
Trump meanwhile chugs along and is enjoying the fall of the losers who have spent almost a decade devoted to hating him. A movie mocking him — The Apprentice — failed to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival and none of the movie distributors will pick it up because they see it as box office poison.
Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times — which fired its opinion editor because he ran a column by a REPUBLICAN senator — sees the refusal to lose money as a threat to free speech.
