“A Safe Space for Trump”: Inside the Feedback Loop Between the President and Fox News
With Roger Ailes gone, the network’s chief de-facto programmer is the president. “He has the same embattled view as a typical Fox viewer.”
In early December, when the news broke that
Rupert Murdoch was preparing to sell his
movie studio and television assets to Disney,
Donald Trump placed an urgent call to the 86-year-old mogul. While Fox News was not one of Murdoch’s assets included in the Disney deal, some observers were speculating that as he passed the torch to his more liberal sons, they might unload the network—a prospect that deeply concerned Trump. According to a person briefed on the conversation, Trump was relieved when Murdoch assured him that he would not be selling Fox News.
While Fox News remains immensely profitable, generating more than $1.5 billion for Murdoch’s empire, there’s an argument to be made that now, at Peak Trump, would be the time to sell. The cable-television industry continues to be buffeted by cord cutting and the rise of streaming competitors. But, ironically, Trump highlights a deeper problem at Fox news. In the post-Roger Ailes era, the network doesn’t have a programming Svengali to develop new story lines. “There’s absolutely no direction,” one Fox host told me. Without Ailes’s daily talking points to guide them, producers are freer than ever before to program their shows, and the surest path to ratings success is airing stories that appeal to Trump’s most fervent supporters. Fox may be Trump’s safe space, but Trump is Fox’s safe space, too. It’s a circular feedback loop.
According to conversations in recent days with current and former Fox executives, producers, and hosts, Trump looms almost as large in the minds of employees as Ailes did. Fox hosts regularly get calls from Trump about segments he likes—or doesn’t. “When you worked at Fox, you knew that at any moment Roger Ailes was watching. Every day was like a job interview with Ailes. Now it’s the same way for Trump,” says a veteran Fox News contributor. According to sources, Trump doesn’t explicitly dictate talking points the way Ailes did, but over time, the effect can be similar. “What he usually does is he’ll call after a show and say, ‘I
really enjoyed that,’” a former Fox anchor told me. “The highest compliment is, ‘I really learned something.’ Then you know he got a new policy idea.” But knowing Trump always could be tuning in means the network is being programmed for an audience of one. “He has the same embattled view as a typical Fox viewer—that ‘the liberal elites hate me; they’re trying to bring me down,’” an executive said.
This dynamic makes it extremely complicated to cover the administration’s near-constant conflagrations. “They don’t want to see stuff about
Michael Wolff. It’s depressing,” one staffer said, speaking about how the network struggled to cover the frenzy around
Fire and Fury. One sure strategy has been to follow Trump’s lead and continue attacking the Clintons. Since becoming president, Trump has
tweeted about
Hillary Clinton about 70 times. Trump brought up Hillary multiple times at a joint press conference with the Norwegian prime minister on January 10. One Fox staffer explained that the anti-Hillary segments rate almost higher than anything else the network programs. “The audience eats up anything about Hillary,” the staffer said. Fox will soon debut a new weekly documentary series called
Scandalous. The subject of the first episode: the Clintons.
The hugely successful alliance is mostly transactional—privately, many at the network have a nuanced view of the president. “He’s sort of viewed as this crazy person who calls all the time,” the Fox executive said. During the early stages of the Republican primary, Fox News was one of Trump’s chief antagonists. Murdoch championed comprehensive immigration reform and was horrified by Trump’s nativist rhetoric, sources told me. I
reported how, shortly before the first G.O.P. primary debate, Murdoch told Ailes to prevent Trump from getting the nomination. But once Trump became the nominee, the network quickly fell into line. It was simply a programming play. Fox producers saw ratings drop whenever something negative about Trump was said on air. Since then, Fox has shed prominent Trump critics like
Megyn Kelly, George Will, and
Rich Lowry, while bulking up on pro-Trump voices such as
Seb Gorka, Laura Ingraham, and
Mark Levin. “The network has become a safe space for Trump fans,” said an executive. Those who didn’t get on board felt the pressure. Last spring,
Bob Beckel, a former co-host of
The Five and vocal Trump detractor, found an unsigned note in his office telling him to back off Trump, a Fox source told me. On the news side, journalists seem to have a somewhat freer hand. Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith have been skeptical in their Trump coverage.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s likely that if Ailes was still running Fox, the network wouldn’t function as state TV. While Ailes was a committed right-winger—I’ve reported how he privately wanted Navy SEALs to shoot immigrants crossing the southern border—he was smart enough to recognize that Fox’s power was maximized if the network appeared to be fair and balanced, even though it wasn’t. For instance, in the run-up to the 2000 election, Fox ran a story about
George W. Bush’s previous drunk-driving arrest. (It’s impossible to see Fox airing a similarly damaging story today.) When Fox got heat for helping to create the Tea Party during Obama’s first term, Ailes told producers to tone down the Tea Party coverage. Propaganda works best when the audience doesn’t feel they’re getting it.
Now, some prominent voices at Fox openly seem to be aiding the Trump agenda. In recent months, hosts such
Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters, and
Jeanine Pirrohave promoted wild conspiracy theories about Trump being the victim of an F.B.I.-led coup. In December,
The New York Times reported that Pirro had a one-hour Oval Office meeting with Trump where she denounced Special Prosecutor
Robert Mueller and Attorney General
Jeff Sessions. If Pirro sometimes appeared to be lobbying for a White House job, it’s possibly because she’d wanted one. A few days after Trump won the election, Pirro walked out of the makeup room at Fox and declared, “I
really want a job in this administration,” according to a person who witnessed the remark. Pirro did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s frustrating to some inside Fox that the network is now seen as the propaganda wing of Trump’s White House and lacks a post-Trump programming strategy. “It’s freaky to see him tweeting at
Fox & Friends,” one staffer said. “That doesn’t help us. We’re not state television.”
