In April 2017, Tucker Carlson’s star at Fox News rose to the top slot, the covered 8:00pm prime time hour that had just been vacated by Bill O’Reilly. He had one challenge: how to build a loyal audience while distinguishing himself from fellow host Sean Hannity, then the network’s biggest ratings draw, who was slavishly pro-Trump. Carlson told friends and co-workers he needed a way to connect with the Trump faithful, but without constantly apologizing for the president’s foibles, something he feared would happen often. As The New York Times Nicholas Confessore recounts in meticulous detail in a just-published three-part series, Carlson quickly figured out that the way for him to rise in popularity was by embracing “Trumpism without Trump,” championing the emotional core of Trump’s allure, white panic over America’s changing ethnic makeup.

Reading Confessore’s reporting, one fact jumped out at me: how much Fox and Carlson himself relies on real-time audience data to decide what to cover and how. Think of this as Big Brother surveillance capitalism on steroids. Confessore writes, “To maintain its dominance in the post-Ailes era, 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.”

I’m not a Fox network insider, so I don’t know exactly how this works. But it’s possible to get an idea of what real-time feedback does to political discourse from elsewhere, specifically countries where the TV producers of national political debates have used something called “the worm” to show how the viewing audience is supposedly responding to what they’re hearing politicians say. First used in Australia in 1993, the worm has shown up in debates in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Viewers are told to download an app that gives them a slider with a spectrum from 0 to 100, and to slide it back and forth depending on whether they like or dislike what they’re hearing.

Here in the US, this is often called “dial testing” and commentators will sometimes refer to it in post-debate coverage, even showing little snippets connected to particular sound-bites. Arguably it can be interesting to see how liberals and conservatives respond differently to particular arguments. But knowing that the public is seeing a real-time ticker (hence, “the worm”) of their cumulative mood has a demonstrable effect on politicians, too, as Ben Tarnoff reported for a project I ran on political debates several years ago. They learn to pander. Cheery, positive comments do well. Fact-based comments that describe a problem do poorly. In 2002, a little-known politician in New Zealand named Peter Dunne earned a surge in popularity after a TV debate where he kept repeating popular phrases like “common sense” and “family.” Of course, after a while, the media and the public alike got smart about “worm whisperers” who were tailoring their presentations to do well in the live dial-test and broadcasters in New Zealand and Australia have largely dropped its use.

The use of “minute-by-minutes” inside Fox explains why Carlson has steadily intensified his coverage of stories that reinforce the white nationalist resentments of his audience, amplifying false claims of undocumented immigrants defecating in the streets, “white farmers” in South Africa supposedly being targeted for death, and other nonsense. “They’re all obsessed with the minute-by-minutes,” a former Fox employee told the Times. “Every second that goes on that network now gets scrutinized.”

Sixteen years ago, Charles Gibson, then the host of ABC’s Good Morning America, gave a speech at an industry awards dinner about the mission of TV news. He told the local news directors in the audience, “I know you all love the minute-by-minutes. They’re like news director crack. Seductive and addictive. But the reputation and eventually the ratings of your newscasts don’t depend on a minute. They depend on the weeks…and the months…and the years of good solid civic coverage of your city.”

Gibson went to argue that chasing ratings by teasing viewers with “exclusives” or “shocking” headlines would eventually cause viewers to become jaded. “Tell them night after night you’ve got a story they can’t afford to miss, and they’ll know they can miss it.” He pointed to an exhaustive study of local newscasts that showed that higher quality newscasts had higher ratings with more attractive audience demographics. Crime stories, which tend to lead local news, actually got slightly smaller audiences than stories dealing with ideas, issues and policy.

Unfortunately, Gibson was a quality journalist with a long-term sense of his role in society speaking to people whose business is short-term ratings. Now, with Fox News and Tucker Carlson, we see exactly where devotion to the basest interests of a loyal audience leads.