Fox News, once Trump’s home, now often ignores him

More than 100 days have passed since Donald J. Trump was interviewed on Fox News.

The network, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and fueled Mr. Trump’s rise from real estate developer and reality star to the White House, now often bypasses him in favor of featuring other Republicans.

In the former president’s view, according to two people who spoke with him recently, being ignored by Fox was a far worse insult than the published stories and comments that he complained were “too negative.” The network has effectively displaced him from his favorite place: the center of the news cycle.

On July 22, as Mr. Trump was rallying supporters in Arizona and teasing the possibility of a 2024 presidential run., saying “We might have to do it again,” Fox News chose not to show the event — the same approach it has taken for nearly all of his rallies this year. Instead, the network aired Laura Ingraham’s interview with a possible challenger for the 2024 Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. It was the first of two prime-time interviews Fox aired with Mr. DeSantis in five days; he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show shortly after speaking with Ms. Ingraham.

When Mr. Trump addressed a gathering of conservatives in Washington this week, Fox did not broadcast the speech live. Instead, it showed a few clips after he finished speaking. That same day, he did broadcast live — for 17 minutes — a speech by former Vice President Mike Pence.

Mr. Trump recently complained to aides that even Sean Hannity, his friend of 20 years, didn’t seem to pay him much attention anymore, a person who spoke to him recalled.

The snub was no accident, according to several people close to Mr. Murdoch’s Fox Corporation who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the company’s operations. This month, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, both owned by Mr. Murdoch, published scathing editorials about Mr. Trump’s handling of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

Skepticism about the former president extends to the highest levels of the company, according to two people familiar with the thinking of Mr Murdoch, the chairman, and his son Lachlan, the chief executive. It also reflects concerns that Republicans in Washington, such as Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, have expressed to the Murdoch family about the potential damage Mr. Trump could do to the party’s chances in the upcoming election, especially to take control of the Senate.

The Murdoch family’s discomfort with Mr. Trump stems from his refusal to accept his election loss, according to two people familiar with those conversations, and is generally in sync with the views of Republicans, such as Mr. McConnell, who mostly supported the former president but has long said the election was rigged and condemned his efforts to cancel it.

A person familiar with the Murdoch family’s thinking said they continue to insist Fox News made the right choice when its decision desk predicted Joseph R. Biden would win Arizona shortly after 11 p.m. in the election, a move that infuriated Mr. Trump and cut short his attempt to prematurely declare victory. This person said Lachlan Murdoch personally described the decision desk call, which came days before other networks concluded Mr Trump had lost the state, as something only Fox “had the guts and the science to do”. .

Some of the people acknowledged that Fox’s current approach to Mr. Trump may be temporary. If Mr. Trump announced he was running for president, or if he were impeached, he would require more coverage, they said.

A spokesman for Mr McConnell declined to comment. A Fox Corporation spokesman also declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump.

The relationship between Mr. Trump and the Murdoch media empire has long been complicated, an arrangement of mutual convenience and mistrust that has had sensational ups and downs since Mr. Trump first spoke out in the gossip pages of The New York Post in the 1980s. those years.

But the dispute between the former president and the media baron who helped set the GOP’s agenda for decades is taking place in a much larger and more fragmented media landscape, as new personalities and platforms make it much harder for either to be a source to change the narrative. Mr. Trump’s allies in the corners of the conservative media more loyal to him — including Breitbart, Newsmax and talk radio — are already seizing the turn at Fox as evidence of betrayal.

Mr. Trump looks ready to fight. He criticized “Fox & Friends” this week on its social media service Truth Social for being “terrible” and for “going over to the ‘dark side’” after one of the hosts mentioned that Mr. DeSantis had defeated Mr. n Trump in two recent polls in a hypothetical Republican primary contest in 2024. Then, without offering evidence, he blamed Paul Ryan, the former Republican speaker of the House with whom he often clashed. Mr. Ryan is a member of the board of directors of Fox Corporation.

The Post often sided with Mr. Trump in its editorials when he was president. But sometimes it worked against him, as when Mr. Trump refused to concede the 2020 election and a front-page newspaper headline blared: “Mr. President, STOP THE MADNESS.”

Mr. Trump found a home at Fox News when the network’s founder, Roger Ailes, gave him a weekly slot on “Fox & Friends” in 2011. Mr. Trump used the platform to connect with the fledgling Tea Party movement while bashed Republicans like Mr. Ryan and spread lies about the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Neither Mr. Ailes nor Mr. Murdoch initially considered Mr. Trump a serious presidential candidate. Mr. Ailes told colleagues at the time that he believed Mr. Trump was using his 2016 campaign to get a better deal with NBC, which aired “The Apprentice,” according to “Insurgency,” the account of this reporter about Mr. Trump’s rise in the GOP And when Ivanka Trump told Mr. Murdoch over lunch in 2015 that her father intended to run, Mr. Murdoch didn’t even look up from his soup , according to The Devil’s Bargain by Joshua Greene.

But as Mr. Trump became bigger than any news outlet — and bigger even than his own political party — he was able to turn the tables and rally his supporters against Fox or any other outlet he thought that he is too critical of him. He regularly uses Twitter to attack Fox personalities such as Megyn Kelly, Charles Krauthammer and Karl Rove.

The network can always be critical of him in its news. But now the skepticism is coming in more forcefully—except from news anchors, in interviews with voters or in opinion pieces about other Murdoch-owned properties.

Referring to the congressional investigation into the January 6 attack, Fox host Bret Baier said it made Mr Trump “look terrible”, recounting how it took him 187 minutes to be persuaded to say anything publicly for the rebellion. A recent segment on FoxNews.com featured interviews with Trump supporters who were extremely unenthusiastic about a possible third campaign, saying they thought “his time has passed” and that he’s “a little too polarizing.” They then offered their thoughts on who should replace him on the ticket. They unanimously nominated Mr. DeSantis.

“I spent 11 years at Fox, and I know that nothing pre-recorded goes on a Fox screen that hasn’t been approved and sanctioned by the highest levels of management,” said Eric Bolling, a former Fox anchor who is now at Newsmax . “Especially when it comes to presidential elections.

There’s no denying that Fox News is Fox News. Viewers in recent weeks have seen occasional critical coverage of Mr. Trump, but unlike other news networks, Fox chose to air its own prime-time program rather than the committee hearings investigating the Jan. 6 attack. (The author of this article is a contributor to MSNBC.) Mr. Carlson, Mr. Hannity and Ms. Ingraham dismissed the hearings as a “show trial.”

“They’re lying and we’re not going to help them do it,” Mr. Carlson said. “What we’re going to do instead is try to tell you the truth.”

The network aired the committee hearings on Jan. 6, a day when far fewer viewers were watching. But other segments throughout the day and early evening played out violent crimes in Democratic-run cities or Mr. Biden’s verbal and physical stumbles. When the government announced that a key indicator of economic health had declined in the last quarter, the headline Fox scrawled on the screen read “Biden Denies Recession as US Enters Recession.”

On April 13, Mr. Trump called into Mr. Hannity’s show and ran through a list of crises that he said would not have happened “if we had won this election, which we did.”

He has not been interviewed on the network since.