Tucker Carlson criticized Fox Nation on technical grounds

Tucker Carlson once severely criticized the Fox Nation app, finding it technically difficult to operate and aesthetically less than pleasing. A prominent review site provides evidence that not only vindicates him, but shows that the problems he listed, remain.

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Matt Gertz of Media Matters supplies the details, and tweeted out a leaked video of Tucker Carlson making these remarks.

Apparently he made them while speaking over the telephone with Andrew Tate, a social-media star with a misogynistic-sounding “schtick.” Gertz actually provides no firm clue as to when this conversation took place – and certainly does not reveal the source of the leak.

The video shows Tucker Carlson on the set of Tucker Carlson Today, a program he headlined for Fox Nation. He is talking over the telephone with Tate, discussing Tate’s rehabilitation. Then he makes a number of complaints about Fox Nation, which he describes as a technical and aesthetic disaster.

In his story, Gertz supplies a transcript of the video. In it, Carlson expresses doubts that Fox Nation has that great an audience, and describes serious technical flaws. He questions the viewing quality of Fox Nation and describes the site as difficult to use. And he accused unnamed persons – presumably the technical crew – of failure to repair its flaws.

“They’re like making, like, Lifetime movies,” he says at one point, in an apparent reference to the Lifetime cable network. “But they don’t … work on the infrastructure of the site.”

Fox Nation reviews

In point of fact, Sitejabber, a collector of site reviews, shows fair to poor reviews of Fox Nation. Only 8.5 percent of reviews were positive in the last twelve months at time of posting. The average rating, from 163 reviews, is 1.64 stars out of five. The value rating is average (2.5 stars), but all other ratings – service, shipping, returns, quality – are below average. Sitejabber highlights these two complaints, both of which seem to back up Tucker Carlson in his assertions about Fox Nation.

“Fox Nation buffers all the time or completely freezes and I have to exit the app and restart it.” CNAV visited Fox Nation on a desktop. An apparent preview video never loaded after sixty seconds. That could have been something one unlocked only by starting a seven-day free trial. But it still looks bad to have an endlessly buffering video greet people on a home or landing page.

“I am a dedicated Fox News viewer but Fox Nation is a customer service disaster.” That’s far more serious, indicating that even the “live human beings” fail in their job. This “top critical review” seems to illustrate the problem:

[Customer service:]The worst! Asking questions and receive a notice that the chat is ending due to inactivity. If they don’t like the question, they disconnect. Extremely rude and unhelpful. One agent says you can only watch 1 device at a time and that this was a change from original 3 devices. The second agent says that isn’t the case. Which is it? No phone number. Insist on written chat. Ridiculous waste of time.

Tucker Carlson said flatly that “the site doesn’t work” and spoke of “a betrayal of [the] efforts” of content creators.