TDS becomes unprofitable

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.

She wrote:

Negotiations are ongoing, and domestic distribution could still come together. Yet the possibility that American audiences won’t be able to see The Apprentice isn’t just frustrating. It’s frightening, because it suggests that Trump and his supporters have already intimidated some media companies, which seem to be pre-emptively capitulating to him.

These are the same outlets that spiked stories about Hunter’s laptop ahead of the election.

The movie’s makers could livestream it on Twitter or some other social media outlet. I suggest they try Truth Social.

After presenting the absurdity that Trump has some sort of voodoo mind-control over the media, Goldberg got really weird:

The fear seems to be twofold. Few want to end up in the MAGA movement’s crosshairs the way Bud Light and Disney did. And as one distribution executive told Variety, any company that wants to be sold, or to merge with or buy another company, would be hesitant to touch The Apprentice because of the possibility that, should Trump be re-elected, his “regulators will be punitive.”

After all, when Trump was president, his Department of Justice tried to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, the company that owned CNN. As The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported, the government’s opposition to the deal was widely seen as retaliation for CNN coverage that displeased Trump.

I remember when lefties hated Corporate America. Now they don’t because now they run it.

But they are not running Corporate Media very well because they’ve wasted their credibility on unhinged attacks on President Trump. They became boring and they look stupid in the Biden era. The people who stopped watching CNN weren’t Trump supporters. They were Democrats — as were the subscribers who canceled the Bezos Post.

Carlson’s abrupt and involuntary departure from Fox resulted in a more profitable and better journalism. Schaffer may want to learn from that. Being fired ain’t so bad once you realize that you didn’t need them — they needed you.

Sunday marked the 9th anniversary of Donald Trump entering the presidential race. Upon his entry, his critics licked their chops and rubbed their hands together. They thought they would have fun and make a lot of money destroying him.

Instead, Hillary’s career is in the past tense. The Weekly Standard is no more. National Review is dying. WaPo lost half its readers. CNN hit a 33-year low in viewership. The market for Orange Man Bad books evaporated. No one cares about a spiteful movie about him.

Meanwhile, his incredible comeback may lead to a second term.