After the 2020 election, the conversation within Fox News was all about “a pivot” — a refocusing of reporting away from former President Donald J. Trump and toward the more conventional Republican politics favored by the network’s founder , Rupert Murdoch.
Mr Murdoch then said he wanted to make Mr Trump a “non-person”. And even in January, when he was impeached as part of the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox, his feelings hadn’t changed. “I’d still like it,” Mr. Murdoch said.
But Fox’s audience — the engine of his profits and the largest in all of cable — may not let him.
Anyone expecting Fox’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion this week to soften or soften the network is likely to be disappointed. And not much is likely to change in the way the network treats Mr Trump favorably and the issues that resonate with his followers.
“How are you going to make an argument against your hosts for not doing things that score?” said Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News editor and on-air personality who was fired from the network in 2021 and lined up to testify in the Dominion case. “You can’t tell people, ‘Do anything to get a rating, but don’t cover the most popular figure in the Republican Party.'”
After a hiatus from the network that lasted much of 2022, Mr. Trump is back on Fox News. He has conducted three interviews with the network in less than a month. The most recent, which was filmed earlier this month with Mark Levin, will air on Sunday.
Even voter fraud — the problem that led to Fox being sued for billions of dollars by Dominion and another voice technology company, Smartmatic — hasn’t completely gone away. In Mr Trump’s recent interview with Fox host Tucker Carlson, he suggested there were good reasons to doubt the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory, saying, “People could say he won an election .”
Mr. Carlson, for his part, has also recently slipped back into election denial. “Jan. 6, I think, is probably second only to the 2020 election as the biggest scam of my life,” he said on air on March 14. how there was no evidence that the results of the 2020 election were materially affected by fraud.)
In the short term, it seems unlikely that Mr. Murdoch will make major changes to any of his Fox properties. According to three people who have worked closely with him, this would be seen as the kind of admission of wrongdoing he is reluctant to make. The Dominion settlement included no apology — just a cursory reference to a judge’s findings that Fox had broadcast false statements about Dominion machines and their role in an imaginative plot to steal Mr. Trump’s election.
The $787.5 million payout is huge — in itself an admission of some sort of wrongdoing, as one of the largest-ever settlements in a libel case. But it didn’t lead to the same level of personal humiliation as the phone hacking scandal involving Mr Murdoch’s UK newspapers. Then, in 2011, he had to appear before parliament and pay for how his journalists had illegally hacked into the voicemail accounts of prominent figures. He had a meringue pie thrown in his face and admitted during his testimony, “This is the most humble day of my life.”
But his signature American news channel shows little sign of humility. It devoted two short segments to news about the Dominion settlement on Tuesday. The coverage then quickly returned to the same topics it has been hammering on since Mr Biden was elected.
The news reports about the wave of migrants on the southern border are presented under the heading “Biden Border Crisis”. Republican lawmakers’ efforts to pass laws banning transgender girls from school sports teams receive prominent attention — when only a small number actually play, and sometimes none at all in states where the laws have been hotly debated. President Biden has been variously portrayed as incoherent, corrupt and weak – especially with regard to his stance on China. Footage of criminals looting shops, assaulting police officers and assaulting unwitting bystanders plays in a loop – often with perpetrators who are black.
Even Mr. Trump’s lies about fraud in the 2020 presidential election have popped up here and there. Last week, right-wing commentator Clay Travis appeared on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” which replaced a more straightforward news program at 7 p.m. last year, and stated that Mr Biden “only won by 20,000 votes after they rigged the entire election.” after they hid everything related to Hunter Biden, to the big tech, to the big media, and to the big collusion with the Democratic Party, it all worked to his advantage.
Mr. Watters did not correct or respond to those remarks on the air.
Stories of voter fraud, often exaggerated and unsubstantiated, were part of the network’s DNA well before 2020. In 2012, Roger Ailes, who co-founded Fox News with Mr. Murdoch, sent a team of journalists to Ohio to investigate still-unsubstantiated claims of malfeasance at the polls after former President Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney there.
However, there are some subtle signs that Fox wants to move beyond the Dominion episodes and the embarrassing revelations of network executives privately belittling the same fraud claims they allowed on-air. It recently launched a promotional campaign to showcase its team of global correspondents in 30-second ads. “We’re on a mission to report the big stories on the ground,” says one. Tensions between the news department and primetime hosts came to light as part of the Dominion case, with private messages from late 2020 revealing that hosts like Mr. Carlson and Sean Hannity had mocked and complained about reporters in the Fox Washington bureau who would fact-check the former president’s fraud claims.
And last week, Fox chose not to renew the contract of one of the most vocal election deniers on its payroll, Dan Bongino, formerly the host of a Saturday night show.
A Fox News spokeswoman said in a written statement that the network had “significantly increased its investment in journalism in recent years, further expanding our involvement in news gathering both at home and abroad.” The statement added: “We are incredibly proud of our team of journalists.”
Mr. Trump undoubtedly remains one of the biggest stories of the moment, putting the network’s leadership in a position it deems less than ideal. In his statement, Mr Murdoch acknowledged privately referring to the former president as “mad”, “ordinary lunatic” and “unable to suppress his egomania”. His personal politics are much closer to those of an established Republican in the form of Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader for whom Mr. Ailes worked as a media consultant decades ago.
Mr. Trump can still rack up big ratings, even if he’s no longer the only figure he once was in the Republican Party. His interview with Mr. Carlson, following his felony charge in Manhattan, drew an audience of 3.7 million. An interview Mr. Carlson did with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis a few weeks earlier drew 3.1 million.
Ultimately, the numbers may be the deciding factor in what Fox’s coverage of the former president is, regardless of Mr. Murdoch’s preferences.
A former Fox executive, John Ellis, summed up the conundrum the network has with its audience in his newsletter after Trump announced his 2024 campaign — an event that Fox News broadcast live. “The power of Fox News to influence GOP primaries results could prove decisive,” he wrote.
“Trump probably can’t win the 2024 nomination if Fox News is determined to beat him,” Ellis added. “But to cover him, Fox News has to have its audience’s permission to do that.”
Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting.
