Fox’s Pledge of Allegiance
On Tuesday night, as Donald Trump feted King Charles and Queen Camilla at a white-tie state dinner, the room could have easily been confused for a Fox News greenroom, given the sheer number of network figures in attendance. Among the crowd of administration officials (some of whom once worked for Fox), billionaires, and Supreme Court justices, were seven Fox News personalities, joined by chief executive Suzanne Scott, mingling between bites of dover sole.
With much of the network’s primetime lineup on the guest list, it served as a visual manifestation of Fox News’ continued allegiance to the Trump White House, standing in sharp contrast to a constellation of right-wing media personalities who have amassed huge digital followings and publicly broken with him on the Iran war.
Indeed, it seems that nearly everyone across the broader MAGA Media ecosystem, including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Joe Rogan, has rebuked Trump’s military operation in Iran, while in some instances sparing Trump personally, as tortured as that sounds, over responsibility for it. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, however, has largely remained in lockstep with the administration, finding ways to justify an increasingly unpopular foreign incursion that is hitting Americans hard at the gas pump and beyond. The network’s stars, including Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, and others, have sought to cast the operation as a success on-air, generally dismissing concerns of an escalating conflict and the economic fallout.
“It’s not an overstatement to call it propagandistic,” Matt Gertz, a senior fellow for progressive media watchdog Media Matters, told Status. “The nightly coverage is basically that Trump is doing everything right. If Trump’s position changes from one night to the next, then they sort of follow in line.” Gertz said the issue has exposed a growing divide between Fox News and what he called “the Fox News diaspora,” which includes former network stars like Carlson and Kelly, who, while operating independently, have shown a willingness to attack the network in a manner once largely confined to progressive critics.
Even in the opening days of the war, Kelly was railing against Fox, calling its coverage “insufferable,” and telling listeners, “If I were a Fox anchor right now, I’d know exactly what to do: Cheerlead. Cheerlead. That’s it.” Sure enough, in early March, Ingraham was declaring victory, saying, “We’ve already won,” and claiming that “There’s zero indication that Donald Trump intends to spend several months, let alone a few years, in Iran,” which would be “economically and politically calamitous for the GOP.”
Meanwhile, Fox News hosts continue to assert that gas price pain won’t last long, has already peaked, or is a sacrifice true Americans should be willing to make in support of Trump’s actions. By contrast, even Ann Coulter argued on Saturday that the Trump-inflicted high fuel costs were the final blow to Spirit Airlines, “caused by a pointless war that has left everyone worse off.”
To be sure, Fox is hardly operating from a position of weakness. The network averaged 3.2 million viewers in weekday primetime ratings in April, outpacing even broadcast networks, according to Nielsen data. And while the overall editorial posture has been in support of Trump’s Iran policy, questioning voices haven’t been entirely absent from the coverage. In late March, Ingraham pondered whether Trump had grasped “how complex” the operation could get with “further possibilities of casualties or other damage.” Dana Perino pressed whether earlier strikes were as successful as the administration boasted, and Brit Hume called Iran-U.S. tensions a “predicament” for Trump, all showing flashes of skepticism. When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the network referred Status to the segments critical of the conflict.
But overall, the split between Fox News and others in the right-wing echo chamber has underscored that the network no longer serves as the undisputed gravitational center of conservative media. Of course, Fox News continues to dominate cable news ratings, remaining deeply influential across the media industry and Trump White House. But it appears to no longer have the unilateral ability to set the conservative media narrative.
“The only people I know who still watch Fox News are boomers and D.C. politicos,” Raheem Kassam, editor of the National Pulse and former editor for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, told Status. “Those are large and influential markets, but they’re not cutting-edge or forward-thinking groups. They’re people who learn about news two or three days after it has happened, and people who want their milquetoast biases confirmed.”
Despite the signs that Fox has lost some of its juice in dictating the conservative agenda, its influence with Trump himself—who regularly posts about what he’s seen while watching his favorite network—remains as powerful as ever, as evidenced by Tuesday’s state dinner.
Gertz pointed to the fallout after the 2020 election, when Trump declared Fox insufficiently supportive of his false election claims and viewers defected in droves. “The network understands that they basically had a near-death experience by getting crosswise” with Trump, he said. When Trump lashed out at Fox, “A huge chunk of the audience abandoned them. And I think the executives and hosts take that to heart and are trying to leave as little daylight as possible between themselves and the president,” Gertz said.
Notably, Fox’s commercial calculation—recognizing Trump’s hold on its core audience, those few million nightly viewers, despite the wider unpopularity of the war in polling—stands in contrast with Murdoch’s newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, which have been willing to be more critical of Trump in their opinion pages than Fox. (The Journal also weathered a lawsuit filed by Trump over its reporting on Trump’s birthday greeting to Jeffrey Epstein.)
The result is that Fox News finds itself uncharacteristically lonely, at least on this issue, from the broader right-wing media discourse. And while Murdoch might not welcome the friendly fire being directed at Fox from a former star like Kelly, after the post-election wakeup call in 2020, he has demonstrated himself to be a pragmatist when it comes to doing anything that might risk alienating its viewers.
Tucker Carlson speaks to New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro. (Screen grab via YouTube/NYT)
Tucker Carlson sat for an extended interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro where among other things he denied floating that Donald Trump is the antichrist, until presented with the receipts showing that he in fact did. [NYT]
SAG-AFTRA followed the Writers Guild of America in tentatively agreeing to a longer four-year agreement with the AMPTP, paving the way for the Directors Guild to begin talks May 11 and secure labor peace in Hollywood. [Deadline]
BBC News is expected to be hit the hardest by the British broadcaster’s planned round of 2,000 job cuts, with the news division slashing costs by 15% and staff told to anticipate heavy layoffs. [Guardian]
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is facing a New Mexico trial beginning Monday that could prompt sweeping changes to how Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp operate, or the company to pull out of the state. [Reuters]
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro told Jake Tapper the shotgun pellet that struck a Secret Service agent outside of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was “definitively” fired by suspect Cole Allen. [The Hill]
Marking World Press Freedom Day, Pope Leo condemned violations of press freedom and honored journalists killed reporting from war zones. [Reuters]
Trump lashed out at Fox News for covering “MORON” Bill Maher’s interview with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, saying the network looks “weak, stupid, and ineffective.” [Mediaite]
Spike Lee bashed critics for calling out “Michael’s” failure to address sexual-abuse allegations, saying it “doesn’t work in the timeline of the film.” [CNN]
Plenty of celebrities will attend the Met Gala Monday, but because of the Jeff Bezos factor, people are also keeping an eye on who—like Meryl Streep—is staying away. [THR]
Aziz Ansari appeared in “Saturday Night Live’s” cold open as Kash Patel, declaring himself “The first Indian person to suck at his job!” [YouTube]
Alix Earle and Alex Cooper, played by Veronika Slowikowska and Chloe Fineman, stopped by Weekend Update to detail their ongoing feud, calling it “Literal Chernobyl for white women.” [YouTube]
Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, and Stanley Tucci in “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” (Photo by Macall Polay/20th Century Studios)
“The Devil Wears Prada 2” got the job done, with $77 million in North America and more than twice that much worldwide for a $234 million debut.
Three-quarters of the audience was female for the 20-years-later sequel, marking a rare women-driven title to launch the summer movie-going season.
“Michael” continued to draw audiences despite the competition, falling just 44% off its stellar premiere, with a $54 million second weekend for a nearly $425 million worldwide haul in its first two weeks.
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” rang up $12 million to crack the $400 million domestic plateau, while another animated offering, faith-based sa flopped with just $3.4 million out of the gate.
The latest episode of Power Lines just dropped.
In this week’s episode: We have the inside story on how Bari Weiss ousted CBS News’ foreign chief this week over disagreements with the network’s coverage of Israel. Plus, the “CBS Evening News” sinks even lower in the ratings, Brendan Carr proves he isn’t a fan of free speech as he tries to silence Jimmy Kimmel, and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon considers rebooting “The Apprentice” with Donald Trump Jr.
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