It’s been over 100 days since Donald J. Trump was interviewed by Fox News.
Owned by Rupert Murdoch, the network that helped Trump rise from being a real estate developer and TV star to the White House now bypasses him in favor of introducing other Republicans. often
In the former president’s view, according to two people who spoke to him recently, Fox ignoring him is a far worse insult than carrying out the stories and comments he complained about. The network is effectively pushing him out of his favorite place: the center of his cycle of news.
On July 22, as Mr. Trump gathered supporters in Arizona and hinted at the possibility of running for president in 2024., say it “We might have to do it again,” Fox News chose not to show the event. Instead, the network aired Laura Ingraham’s interview with his rival candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination, Ron DeSantis Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. This was his first of two prime-time interviews that Fox aired over his five days with Mr. DeSantis. He appeared on the Tucker Carlson show shortly after talking to Ms. Ingraham.
When Trump addressed a conservative rally in Washington this week, Fox did not broadcast the speech live. Instead, some clips were shown after he finished speaking. On the same day, he broadcast former Vice President Mike Pence’s speech live for 17 minutes.
Trump recently complained to aides that even his friend of 20 years, Sean Hannity, didn’t seem to pay him much attention.
These snubs are no coincidence, according to several people close to Murdoch’s Fox Corporation who spoke on condition of anonymity about the company’s business. this month, new york post When wall street journalBoth are owned by Mr. Murdoch.
Skepticism about the former president has spread to the highest levels of the company, according to two people familiar with the thinking of Chairman Murdoch and his son Lachlan. It also addresses concerns expressed by Washington Republicans, such as Republican Minority Party leader Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, to the Murdochs about the harm Trump could do to the Republican Party in the upcoming election. reflects. Senate.
The Murdochs’ displeasure with Trump stems from Trump’s refusal to accept losing the election, and is broadly in line with Republicans like McConnell. He said the election was closed long ago and denounced his efforts to overturn it.
A person familiar with the Murdochs’ thinking said that when the Fox News decision-making desk predicted that Joseph R. Biden would win Arizona just after 11:00 p.m. said he continued to insist that he made the right decision. Trump evaded his attempts to prematurely declare victory. According to this person, Lachlan Murdoch said only Fox “had the courage and science” about the decision-desk phone calls days before other networks concluded Trump had lost the state. concluded that
Donald Trump, Post-President
The former president remains a powerful force in Republican politics.
Some have acknowledged that Fox’s current approach to Trump may be temporary. If Trump announced he was running for president or was indicted, he would need more coverage, they said.
A spokeswoman for McConnell declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Fox Corporation declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for Trump.
Trump’s relationship with the Murdoch media empire has long been complicated. Since Trump first appeared on the New York Post’s gossip pages in the 1980s, the deal of mutual favor and distrust has seen sensational ups and downs.
But the dispute between the former president and the media baron who has helped set the Republican agenda for decades is occurring in a much larger and fragmented media landscape. Already Trump’s allies in conservative media corners loyal to Trump, including Breitbart, Newsmax and Talk Radio, see the tipping point within Fox as evidence of betrayal.
Trump seems willing to fight.he blown up Posting “Fox & Friends” on his social media service Truth Social this week, one of its hosts called DeSantis “terrible” after he beat Trump two-to-one. , a recent poll for a hypothetical 2024 Republican primary, as “turned to the ‘dark side.'” He then accused former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan without providing any evidence. Mr. Ryan is a member of the Board of Directors of Fox Corporation.
When Trump was president, the Washington Post often sided with him in editorials. But it sometimes worked against him, like when Trump refused to admit his 2020 election loss and his front-page headline in the paper exclaimed: .President, please stop the madness.“
Trump found a place on Fox News in 2011 when network founder Roger Ailes gave him a weekly slot on Fox and Friends. Like Ryan, he spread lies about the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
Initially, neither Ailes nor Murdoch considered Trump a strong candidate for president. Ailes told his colleagues at the time that he believed Trump was using his 2016 campaign to try and make a better deal with his NBC, which aired “The Apprentice.” . GOP And when Ivanka Trump told Murdoch over lunch in 2015 that her father was going to run for office, Murdoch reportedly didn’t even look up from the soup, Joshua said.・Green’s “The Devil’s Bargain” reports.
But as Trump grew bigger than any news outlet, and even bigger than his own party, he turned the tables, drawing supporters against Fox and other outlets he felt were too critical of him. I was able to get it together. He regularly used his Twitter to attack his Fox personalities such as Megyn Kelly, Charles Krauthammer and Karl Rove.
The network could always be critical of him in its news coverage. In opinion articles about assets.
Fox anchor Brett Byer, referring to the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attacks, described how it took Trump 187 minutes to be persuaded to say anything publicly about the riots. By elaborating, he said, he made Trump “look scary.” One recent segment on FoxNews.com featured an interview with a Trump supporter who was overwhelmingly enthused about the possibility of a third election campaign, thinking that “his days are over” and that he ” It’s a little too polarized,” he said. They then offered their ideas as to who should replace him on the ticket.Unanimously, they named Mr. DeSantis.
“I spent 11 years at Fox, and I know nothing recorded on Fox’s screen that hasn’t been signed off. ‘Especially when it concerns the presidential election.'”
There is no denying that Fox News will remain Fox News. Viewers in recent weeks have seen occasional critical coverage of Mr Trump, but unlike other news networks, Fox did not respond to the hearings of the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks. (The authors of this article are MSNBC contributors.) Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham dismissed the hearing as a “show trial.”
“They are lying. We are not going to help them do that,” Carlson said. “What we do instead is try to tell you the truth.”
The network aired the Jan. 6 committee hearings during the day, with far fewer viewers. When the government announced that a key indicator of economic health had fallen last quarter, a Fox headline ran across the screen and read, “As US plunges into recession. , Biden denies recession.”
On April 13, Trump called Hannity’s show to go through a list of crises he claimed “wouldn’t have happened had he won this election.”
He has not been interviewed by the network since.