For the most part, President Donald Trump, a rabid cable news follower, could tune in to find Fox News star hosts heaping praise on him and his administration while lambasting his critics and political enemies.
The Hill reports Trump still has his supporters on the network, but the dynamic between a former president openly flirting with another run for the White House and Rupert Murdoch’s top media asset is definitely changing.
For one thing, Fox is more focused on President Biden, a subject of relentless prime-time attacks, than Trump, and the network didn’t air Trump’s speech this week in Washington, D.C., even as it did air a portion of an earlier address Tuesday by former Vice President Mike Pence. \
“Trump’s superpower was getting all the coverage. That’s not happening anymore. Fox is not covering him 24 hours a day,” said Daniel Cassino, a media expert who wrote a 2016 book about the network’s influence over American politics. “So it seems that is leading to frustration that he’s not dominating Fox the way he did before.”
That tension boiled over this week, when Trump lashed out at Fox and its flagship morning program, “Fox & Friends,” after two of the show’s longtime co-hosts threw cold water on polling suggesting young voters felt Trump was the best choice for Republicans looking to win back the White House.
“Character is revealed in a crisis, and Mr. Pence passed his Jan. 6 trial,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote last week. “Mr. Trump utterly failed his.”
The recent ascension of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to the national spotlight has given Murdoch’s news outlets a new face to put forth for its millions of viewers and readers as a potential successor to Trump as the leader of the Republican Party and conservative movement.
British pundit Piers Morgan, whom Murdoch recently hired to host a show on United Kingdom-based TalkTV, penned an op-ed in the Post earlier this summer explicitly urging conservative voters in the U.S. to “dump Trump” and throw their support behind DeSantis.
“I think that Trump is quite frankly a dead weight for Fox and Murdoch,” said A.J. Bauer, a professor at the University of Alabama who researches and analyzes trends in conservative media. “He did a lot of very helpful work for them, he boosted them for four, five, six years, but they’re not loyal in the way that he expects and the way he needs in order for his political winds to shift.”
No comments:
Post a Comment