The Perfect Enemy | Opinion | Tucker Carlson Is Proof That the Customer Isn’t Always Right - The New York Times
March 13, 2024

Opinion | Tucker Carlson Is Proof That the Customer Isn’t Always Right – The New York Times

Opinion | Tucker Carlson Is Proof That the Customer Isn’t Always Right  The New York Times

Economists generally believe that more information makes for better decisions. But when it comes to the news business, you have to wonder. The more that producers and editors know about their audiences, the more they’re tempted to give them exactly what they want. “The customer is always right” is a fine principle when the product is breakfast cereal but problematic when you’re selling news and opinion.

I looked into this topic after reading a multipart series by the news side of this newspaper on Tucker Carlson, the host of Fox News’s flagship program, “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” The second part of the series included this description of Fox News’s efforts to track its viewer’s preferences in fine-grain detail:

The teams working on Fox’s evening lineup began to make wider use of expensive ratings data known as “minute-by-minutes.” Unlike the “quarter-hour” ratings more commonly used in cable newsrooms, which show how each 15-minute “block” performed, the minute-by-minutes allow producers to scrutinize an audience’s real-time ebb and flow. Mr. Carlson, determined to avoid his fate at CNN and MSNBC, was among the network’s most avid consumers of minute-by-minutes, according to three former Fox employees.

You know that rush of excitement you get when you post something on Facebook that gets a lot of likes? Imagine how much more powerful the rush is for TV anchors and their teams when their words and images strike a chord with viewers.

It’s not just pride; it’s also money. Advertisers pay more for bigger audiences. As the Times series shows, Carlson discovered that ratings soared when he stoked his viewers’ fears on topics such as immigration and crime. So he gave them more of it.

“They talk to the audience where the audience is, and it works,” Al Tompkins, a former TV journalist who teaches journalism at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., told me. “Ford and Chevy and Toyota would love to have such loyal customers.”

Fox News is far from the only organization that uses detailed audience data to tailor its content. This is a live issue for all of us who consume TV or online news. Still, Fox News stands out because of the inflammatory content of its messages and its effectiveness in conveying them. Fox News leaves its viewers wanting even more of what it supplies.

Right-leaning news organizations have a stronger effect than left-leaning ones on their audiences’ points of view on multiple issues, including overall political philosophy, according to a PLOS One journal article in March by Megan Earle and Gordon Hodson of Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. “These findings suggest that partisan news, and particularly right-leaning news, can polarize consumers in their sociopolitical positions, sharpen political divides and shape public policy,” they wrote.

Without sophisticated audience-monitoring tools supplied by Nielsen and others, the message refinement that Fox News has perfected might not be possible.

“It’s created this interesting moral dilemma within journalism,” said Philip Napoli, a professor in Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “How much do we allow what we do know about people’s wants and preferences to guide our decisions about the journalism we produce? There’s something to the notion of ignorance being bliss.”

There are spheres of life where ignorance really can be bliss. Many people don’t want to know if they have a genetic predisposition for a deadly disease, such as Parkinson’s. Investors may choose not to look at their stock portfolios during bear markets. Entrepreneurs who are starting a business may ignore information about the odds against their success so as not to be discouraged.

“It is possible that no textbook would ever be written, no house built and no opera composed if people based their decision on the progress and success of similar endeavors,” Ralph Hertwig and Christoph Engel wrote in a 2021 book, “Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know.”

An alternative view is that it’s not the information that’s a problem but how it’s used. “There’s a tendency to assume that the presence of the data is going to do something in and of itself, just by being there,” said Caitlin Petre, a Rutgers University assistant professor who last year came out with the book “All the News That’s Fit to Click.” In reality, she said, “Metrics mean something very different in a newsroom where you’re expected to quadruple your traffic versus one where managers are not bearing down on you so much.”

Some news outlets withhold audience metrics from reporters for fear of influencing them to focus on click bait. But that doesn’t always work, either, Petre said. If editors are basing promotions in part on who generates the most traffic, the reporters understandably want to know what their numbers are.

This is a tricky article for me because I wrestle with the same questions: what to cover, what angle to take, how to be responsible while being interesting. Clicks, shares, comments, time spent and all the other metrics that news organizations track can be seductive. Too seductive. Sometimes it’s better not to know.


Late last year, vaccinations against Covid-19 in the United States prevented deaths at a cost of about $55,000 per life saved, according to an analysis by the Harvard economist Robert Barro. That is an amazing bargain, considering that various government agencies value a human life at $7 million to $10 million for purposes of deciding which lifesaving regulations are cost-effective.

From September through November 2021, a 14 percent rise in the vaccination rate lowered the death rate by about 41 percent, Barro calculated. From December through this February, the cost per life saved rose to about $200,000, still a bargain. Barro has three theories for the increased cost: Vaccines’ efficacy waned over time, the vaccines were less effective against new variants, and people and governments let down their guard, allowing infections to spread.


“In the past, organized labor raised living standards and shored up democracy. It can happen again.”

— Sanford Jacoby, “Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations From Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank” (2021)

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