Viewers have long complained that media outlets are drifting to the Left, chasing ‘Woke’ advertising dollars, political relationships, and lucrative funding arrangements.

This ‘leftward drift’ has been evident for decades among public broadcasters and prominent journals, many of which have never sought to conceal their political bias. Some have spent so long kneeling on the altar of cultural Marxism that they accidentally sacrificed themselves, getting tied up in the intellectual idiocy of today’s identity politics and its ‘persecution for clicks’ mantra. After all, who didn’t chuckle at The Guardian’s reparations saga after an in-house investigation?

The public begrudgingly put up with this landscape of progressive publications because there were a few conservative skyscrapers holding the balance of conversation. These media empires cast long shadows over the chaos of progressive news to the point that full-time activist groups made it their life’s mission to see them destroyed.

What if the days of alternative media are numbered?

It has not escaped the public’s attention that publications and networks which once held the mainstream conservative line have adopted Net Zero Climate Change cultism, racial politics, Covid hysteria, and editorial lines that run contrary to everything we thought we knew about conservative politics.

Frankly, they have stopped questioning powerful and well-financed political movements.

A perfect example of these muddy waters can be seen where news organisations accepted advertising revenue from pharmaceutical companies during the middle of the Covid pandemic. Is this a conflict of interest as media publications are increasingly called upon to investigate the harms and deaths related to vaccine injuries? We don’t know, but it feels a bit like taking money from Big Tobacco in the late 90s.

Some publications have turned on conservative political figures, others have failed to interrogate left-wing governments or properly scrutinise their policies, as one would expect from the ‘other side’ of media.

Never is this more obvious than during political debates across the West which have become soft campaign promotions where the moderator is little more than an auto-cue whose lines feel as though they were penned by the party’s media adviser. Heaven forbid a journalist trap a Prime Minister or President in an embarrassing web of failure in front of the cameras… That might see that journalist dis-invited from the next media event.

Once upon a time, politicians were afraid of the press. Now, the media fear being locked out of the political cycle as politicians are able to lean on social media and its free source of publicity. They don’t think they need the press.

It is into this messed up media world that the sacking of Tucker Carlson took place. Sure, Fox News has killed off its stars before and quickly replaced them with the next ‘big thing’. That was then, when talent was lined up and waiting in the wings.

There is no obvious successor to Tucker Carlson.

One of his first actions was to post his response on Twitter – a social media platform that politicians both fear and yearn to harness. It was a flexing of his personal power. An experiment, shall we say, about whether a star can truly be bigger than the network that felled them.

Tucker’s response has so far reached over 71 million people with 21 million views, which is an enormous reach by anyone’s measure.

Good evening pic.twitter.com/SPrsYKWKCE

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 27, 2023

During his broadcast, Tucker said:

‘Both political parties and their donors have reached [a] consensus on what benefits them, and they actively collude to shut down any conversation about it. Suddenly the United States looks very much like a one-party state. That’s a depressing realisation, but it’s not permanent. And the current orthodoxies won’t last … Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left, but there are some.’

There could be more to the Tucker story, as detailed by many publications, including The Australian, which wrote:

The private messages in which Mr. Carlson showed disregard for management and colleagues were a major factor in that decision, according to other people familiar with the matter. Although many portions of the Dominion court documents are redacted, there is concern among Fox Corp. executives that if the redacted material were to become public, it would lead to further embarrassment for the network and parent company.

But the particulars of Tucker’s case are not important to the survival of conservative media in general.

While some have reported, ‘inside Fox News, there has been a growing sense that Mr. Carlson couldn’t be managed, and viewed himself as untouchable’, that is not unusual behaviour for media stars. The same could be said of virtually all of the BBC’s TV stars over the last 50 years. It is behaviour that goes with the territory of stardom. To drag this out as an excuse and hear it virtually unquestioned says a lot about those reporting on the incident. The media aren’t really looking for answers.

To be sure, Tucker is probably a tad difficult, but has that ever been an excuse to fell a star?

What if it wasn’t Tucker’s personality, but rather his words that have annoyed management? What if the largest star on the network contradicted the new political order and agreed social narrative?

Believe it or not, the audience is no longer the most important thing to media executives. Influence is what matters, and that is found in the boardroom, not on the screen. Flamboyant, adored superstars that drag the public around on an emotional high are the very last thing that some networks want when the underlying political narrative is fragile or laughably flimsy. It’s much better to have newsreaders that ‘play the game’, so to speak, and behave themselves – anchors that are watched but not loved.

We are no longer seeing a subtle ‘leftward drift’ among the media empires of the West. This is a leftward march, one that you can hear coming. The once grand nations of liberal thought are facing a future of political monoliths defended by a singular media organism.