Fox News likes Trumpism a lot more than it likes Trump
Fox News remains the No. 1 propaganda outlet for the American right, but there are growing fissures in its relationship with Donald Trump.
Last week, Fox dumped host Maria Bartiromo for tipping off the White House that Fox brass had ordered its staff not to amplify a Trump prime-time speech about election fraud.
“Basically she was calling daddy to tell on mommy,” CNN’s S.E. Cupp said. “She was basically saying, ‘Mommy won’t let me do this, dad. What are you going to do about it?’”
You can be sure Fox didn’t ignore Trump’s speech out of journalistic integrity, because that’s not Fox’s brand. Instead, the network wanted to avoid another defamation lawsuit like the one that cost it $787 million for spreading Team Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
There are other signs of conflict between Trump and Fox, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan. Some Fox personalities have complained about Trump’s disastrous conduct of the war in Iran. When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tried to restrict journalists covering the Pentagon, Fox joined other media in pushing back. Hegseth, a former Fox host, hasn’t been on the network in almost a year. And Trump frequently denounces Fox News’ polls, one of the network’s few products that can actually be believed.
Trump is at odds with another Murdoch outlet, too, suing the Wall Street Journal for reporting – apparently accurately – that Trump sent a birthday note to his sex trafficker friend Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.
While Trump has provided the personality for the fascist movement Fox supports, it’s obvious that the Murdochs view him as a liability to the cause. He’s too overtly corrupt, too focused on gilded statues, too damn crazy. He revs up the resistance. Remember that Fox clearly backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president after Trump seemed too toxic to win in the post-Jan. 6 period. Murdoch supposedly told a friend he wanted to make Trump a “non-person.” It was only after Trump proved his staying power and DeSantis showed his lack of charisma that Fox re-boarded the Trump train.
I can’t read the Murdochs’ minds, so I don’t know whether they’re guided more by their right-wing views or their desire to capture an audience and make money off of it. There’s plenty of evidence that both are significant factors.
In the legal battle over who would control Rupert Murdoch’s empire after his death, the patriarch was vitally concerned with securing it in the hands of Lachlan because he most closely mirrors his father’s politics. If it were all about money, Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t care about that.
But if it were all about politics, the old man wouldn’t let the Wall Street Journal’s news side undercut Trump the way it does – not just on the birthday note to Epstein but also on Trump’s push for the Justice Department to launch investigations, his efforts to grab Venezuela’s oil, and his rupturing of relations with European allies. The Murdochs know their lucrative WSJ subscriber base is upscale and sophisticated. The customers would leave if WSJ started pulling Fox News-style stunts.
Even Fox’s amplification of 2020 election fraud lies seems to have had more to do with money than a desire to help keep Trump in office. Internal communications released in lawsuits against Fox show that its top people knew Trump had lost, but they panicked over losing market share to even more extreme-right competitors.
Tucker Carlson wrote: “We’re playing with fire, for real … an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”
Jesse Watters put it in a more upbeat but equally dishonest way: “Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL.”
Since its $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, the network has learned how to have it both ways – spreading right-wing lies without getting sued over them, as I wrote a couple years ago.
At this point, Fox seems determined to promote Trumpism while maintaining some distance from Trump. In essence, they’re working toward the same thing – a less kind, less fair, less free country.
What looks like a Murdoch-Trump feud may be more personal than professional – two corrupt old warhorses locked in a battle of egos. After Trump sued over the Epstein story, Rupert Murdoch told associates, “I’m 94 years old and I will not be intimidated,” according to the Washington Post.
But as Jon Allsop put it in the New Yorker last year: “Their relationship, ultimately, deserves to be remembered not as one of occasional antagonism but one of persistent mutual benefit.”
That will end some day, and I suspect Fox will last longer than Trump. When Fox no longer finds Trump useful and stops fearing his wrath, it will turn on him completely. And long after Rupert Murdoch goes to that tabloid newsroom in the sky, his son’s version of Fox will be polluting journalism to prop up other fascist liars.
This week’s media atrocity
Longtime readers know I’ve speculated that the New York Times has a Euphemism Desk where they find ways to soften hard truths. In an impressive new example, they avoided saying Maria Bartiromo allowed her guests to lie, instead writing that she was “permitting guest commentators to free-associate.”
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