Wednesday’s Iowa town hall rankled staffers who see the network—like most of the GOP—falling in line behind the 2024 front-runner. As one correspondent acknowledged afterward, “Trump is the monster we created.”
With less than a week until the first votes are cast in the 2024 Republican primary, front-runner Donald Trump blew up Fox News’ prime time schedule on Wednesday. The former president and de facto programming executive booted his longtime ally Sean Hannity out of his 9 p.m. time slot and held a town hall with Iowa voters to compete with CNN’s debate between Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.
Baier had been wooing Tump for quite a while, and Trump suddenly agreed to participate after the CNN debate details were locked. “They would only do it if it was at that time,” he said. “We offered a number of different times. That was their stipulation.”
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The history between Trump and Fox is so fraught, and the relationship is so convoluted, that writers typically spend several paragraphs explaining the complexities. But it is also, at a gut level, quite simple. The Fox brand and the Trump brand are both about defeating Democrats and exploiting the levers of power.
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...Rupert Murdoch really did try to make him a “non person,” as Murdoch’s own emails (also obtained by Dominion) revealed. “Fox News very busy pivoting” away from Trump, Murdoch remarked to a former Fox executive in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection. At the time, Murdoch and almost everyone else thought that Trump’s political life was over. But Fox—and then host Tucker Carlson in particular—also helped revive Trump by recasting January 6 as a government plot to entrap poor Trump voters. As the base warmed back up to Trump, so did Fox. And Lachlan Murdoch didn’t stand in the way.
"but he generates clicks, drives engagement, and keeps people tuning in whether they hate him or not, why would we quit that?"
"But what about the shareholders‽"