Tucker Carlson sat down with Bill O’Reilly in an interview designed to compete against the second 2024 Republican Presidential debate. O’Reilly is claiming victory in the battle.
During an appearance on The Ross Kaminsky Show on KOA 850 AM, Bill O’Reilly argued that a small percentage of Americans are actually interested in the debate format.
“It’s obsolete. These things don’t matter anymore. Look, about 9 million people watched the debate. In the last election, about 155 million people voted for President. Less than 5% tuned in for the debate. When Tucker Carlson interviewed me on X this week, 25 million people watched the interview. So 9 million watched the debate and 25 million watched two guys just bloviating,” O’Reilly said.
“The American people are tired of this. The only debate that would matter would be one on one Republican against one Democrat. Seven people on the stage yelling at each other? It’s just tedious.”
While publicly available analytics claim 25 million viewed the interview between O’Reilly and Carlson, many have taken umbrage with the way X, formerly Twitter, counts “views”. Allegations against the social media platform claim X counts placements in timelines as views, rather than actual interactions with the video content.
O’Reilly continued by noting that if he were the leader of a television news organization, he would scrap the debate format and would “assign my toughest interviewer to interview all the candidates one-on-one for about 20 minutes” as an alternative.
