Excerpt:
"The historic popularity and profitability of Tucker’s show raises a simple, yet important question: why have none of the major networks, including Fox, attempted to copy his success?

Wouldn’t the fabled “marketplace of ideas” dictate a certain convergence toward the topics and styles that draw the biggest audiences?

Perhaps the ad boycotts aimed at Tucker have scared off would-be copycats. But this simply raises the question of why companies would leave money on the table by refusing to advertise on television’s most popular cable news show. Something is off here, and it suggests that the media industry does not work according to a simple profit motive.

What if the true goal of a media conglomerate is not to produce a reliable and entertaining news service tailored to its audience, but rather to influence that audience on behalf of third parties? What if the purpose of a media company is not to be profitable for its own sake, but influential for the sake of others?

Business models aren’t always what they present themselves to be. Movie theaters make money not from ticket sales, but from concession stands. Airlines likewise need to sell tickets, but they make more profit from frequent flier rewards programs. Supermarkets are increasingly big data collectors for insurance companies.

Users of Google, YouTube, and other internet/social media services might think of themselves as “customers,” but they are actually the product, as those services collect detailed data on users and sell it to third parties for advertising purposes.

The Washington Post provides a clear example of a media company’s true business model.

Readers might recall that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Post for $250 million. The paper is of course notoriously biased against Trump, even by the standards of today’s mainstream media. This may be good for business and it may not be — but ultimately this is not what matters. What matters is that the Post is directly or indirectly profitable to its owner, Jeff Bezos. If it lost money, but influenced the public or other important constituencies in a manner that resulted in greater success for Amazon (a company 10,000 times its size), it would still be a worthwhile investment for Bezos.

We can generalize this principle by noting that the parent-subsidiary model is very common in business. Any given subsidiary does not have to be profitable in its own right so long as it benefits the parent company. In the case of The Washington Post, there is a clear “parent company” in the person of Jeff Bezos. But even absent the existence of a formal parent company, one can think of the American power structure itself as the true “parent company” of any sufficiently large and powerful media conglomerate.

Although in some cases this is a metaphor, it captures a very important feature of how the media and our country function. For a media empire operating at the highest levels, the influence it wields on the public’s mind is far more valuable to the ruling power structure than any self-contained profit that could be generated by optimizing their news product to suit the taste of the audience."