I think you're proving my point though.

While it's true that people follow their affirming media (e.g. Tucker Carlson), they also accept a lot of what he says, without critical thought.

The "facts" he presents are the basis for their beliefs, and since he is very selective and slanted about the information he presents, they believe it to be further affirmation of their preexisting beliefs or biases.

This is the essence of propaganda and manipulation. Fill in the gaps of people's knowledge/belief with something that's plausible and favorable to you, even if it's only part of the story.

Content generation is Propaganda 101. Editorial control of a trusted entity is a higher level. Algorithm manipulation of a (perceived) neutral/noninvolved source is a higher level yet. And personalized algorithm manipulation is basically spear phishing. Which works extremely well!

Well, again I'd look at the examples where a media (or in this case) a media source falls outside what is expected. With Tucker this is easy - he's a very religious person and quite regularly makes his religion a significant part of his arguments, yet few people who follow him support or advocate those claims. In fact he has some order of magnitudes greater viewers than his entire religious group has followers! People follow him mostly for the multipolar and anti-hegemony stuff, but accept (while not embracing) embracing his own distinct takes outside of that because they don't generally run too hard against these worldviews.

Contrast this against the NYTimes. People follow it for the woke, pro-hegemony, pro-establishment stuff. But as per the example with Senator Tom Cotton, if they veer to far from this ideology, far from just accepting it - they rant and rave, and if NYTimes didn't promise to get back on track - they would also have left.