In the days that followed Obama’s re-election, Fox’s ratings fell, so much at some points that the network was trailing MSNBC in the key 25-to-54 age demographic, a focus of advertisers. As the discussion about whether and how the network had lost the trust of its audience continued, executives in the news division dropped their most strident poll denier, the political analyst Dick Morris, and sidelined Rove. But another network regular, Donald J. Trump, appeared to draw a different lesson from the election miss. The audience wanted to stay in the world Fox presented the first time.
In 2012, you could see the seeds of Trump’s 2016 victory and even the run-up to the Jan. 6 crisis. The longtime television personality knew his audience — soon to be his base — better than any Fox host, and he did not hesitate to feed it: “More reports of voting machines switching Romney votes to Obama,” Trump tweeted before voting had even ended; then afterward, “Let’s fight like hell to stop this great and disgusting injustice,” and “We can’t let this happen, we should march on Washington and stop this travesty” and “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!”
Trump, with his flagrant disregard for facts, presented every news organization with significant challenges. For Fox, the problem was even trickier. Trump had a particularly strong hold on its core audience members. Would Fox follow them down the rabbit hole? By the time he clinched the 2016 Republican nomination, they had choices. For the first time, there were other options for conservative news consumers on television — Newsmax, which Ruddy had brought to cable in 2014, and One America News Network, which made its debut in 2013. The new networks were “barely a blip,” one Fox executive would say dismissively. In the early summer of that year, Ailes came under scrutiny for serial sexual harassment and abuse at the network, which would lead to his ouster; after the Murdochs forced Ailes out that July, he became an informal political adviser to Trump. Hannity was acting as an informal adviser to Trump, too, crossing Ailes’s onetime line. Quietly, that August, the network dropped its defining slogan: “Fair and Balanced.”
The ratings soared higher, and more obstacles fell away. James Murdoch, then in a contest with his brother, Lachlan, to succeed Rupert at the top of the empire, argued that Fox should impose stricter journalistic standards and dial down its pro-Trump coverage to avoid brand troubles for the Fox Corporation’s movie business and ease any plans for expansion. Rupert picked Lachlan, who thought holding the current course was a no-brainer. Murdoch sold the studios to Disney, and James went out on his own. Fox News became an increasingly important profit driver of the family business.
Fox’s opinion hosts were drawing ever closer to Trump’s inner circle, and their bosses seemed less willing than ever to pull them back. In one especially striking moment at a rally for the 2018 midterm elections, Hannity stood next to Trump at his presidential lectern, pointed to the reporters in the back of the hall — including Fox’s Kristin Fisher — and called them “fake news.” The reporters on the news side were furious. The network issued a tepid statement that it did not “condone talent participating in political events.” During a lunch with Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace, Fox New’s executive editor, the network’s leading news anchors — among them Chris Wallace, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum — urged the bosses to bring disciplinary action. But nothing appeared to come of it. Hannity continued to help Trump into the next campaign year, even as the brand-name journalists were heading for the door. Carl Cameron, a senior political correspondent, had already left in August 2017, later saying the network’s journalists were being drowned out by “partisan misinformation” from the opinion side. The anchor Shepard Smith left in 2019 and would go on to cite similar complaints.
