You Might Not Want to Think About Fox News Right Now. You Should – By Justin Peters (Slate) / May 15, 2024
The network still has the power to tip elections. And it just might.
This is part of Sly as Fox, a short series about the perils of underestimating Fox News in 2024.
In September 2023, the author Michael Wolff published what amounted to a book-length obituary for America’s most popular cable news network. Titled The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, it argued that Fox News had been in decline since the departure of its founding CEO, Roger Ailes, in 2016, and the roughly concurrent political ascent of alleged billionaire Donald J. Trump. Ever since then, Wolff contended, Fox had struggled to maintain its once-unassailable place at the head of the American conservative movement while contending with personnel turnover, shaky internal leadership, competition from newer and wing-nuttier news outlets, the precipitous decline of the cable-television industry, historically expensive lawsuits—and the ungovernable Trump, who felt no need to genuflect to the network’s power.
In Wolff’s telling, longtime Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch’s rumored disdain for Trump was very real, as was his frustration over his inability to break Trump’s grip on the Republican base. After the GOP’s dismal performance in the 2022 midterms, Fox News clearly attempted to starve Trump of oxygen by instead boosting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom it portrayed as the ideal Republican standard-bearer going into the 2024 presidential elections.
A year and a half later, though, Trump has a stranglehold on the Republican nomination. DeSantis is sitting in Tallahassee, licking his fingers. And Fox News is now forced to confront this evidence of its apparent editorial impotence. To Fox, Trump has become rather like a houseguest who asserts squatters’ rights and somehow ends up as the landlord—an untenable outcome for a media mogul like Murdoch, who for decades has been accustomed to being the power behind countless thrones. With characteristic savagery, Wolff portrayed Murdoch as a doddering nonagenarian unable to parse the changes in the cable business and unwilling to accept that American conservatism’s center of gravity had shifted away from him. Then, a few days before The Fall was published, Murdoch abruptly announced his impending retirement from the chairmanships of both Fox Corp. and News Corp. The news seemed like a validation of Wolff’s thesis. Trump had won the power struggle, Fox News had become irrelevant, and Murdoch was just an elderly rat fleeing a sinking ship.
CONTINUE > https://slate.com/business/2024/05/fox-news-donald-trump-joe-biden-election.html
