wisepowder: Can Fox News survive without Trump in the White House?

wisepowder

Can Fox News survive without Trump in the White House?



Sadly, history has largely forgotten the Rector Thomas Beverley. In 1695, he wrote a book predicting the world would end in 1697. In 1698 he wrote another book, complaining the world had ended but no-one had noticed. If he were alive today, he might be a Republican senator or perhaps a senior executive at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News.To get more latest news on foxnews, you can visit shine news official website.

The defeat of Donald Trump is not quite the end of the world for Fox News, but it is the passing of a golden age, and the network has met it with a large dose of denialism. In the two weeks after Fox News called the US presidential election for Joe Biden, the network’s hosts and guests cast doubt on the results at least 774 times, according to Media Matters for America.

There has rarely, if ever, in any democracy been such a partnership between a news network and a government leader as there was between Fox and Trump. Fox was the preferred conduit for his administration’s announcements and interviews. The president was also the network’s chief publicist, tweeting his views, often in real time, about what Fox News was broadcasting.

This was a mutually beneficial partnership. Trump got his views out without serious contradiction or questioning, while everyone in the political class had to give constant attention to Fox.It also paid off commercially. While Fox News had been the leading cable news channel for 20 years, by 2020 it was the third-most-watched network in the country in prime time on weekdays – not just in cable, but all of television, behind only CBS and NBC. And 2020 was its most successful year yet. In the third quarter, its ratings were nearly double the year before.

Sean Hannity was the highest-rated show on cable, with an average audience of 4.45 million. And he was Fox’s highest-paid star, earning US$43 million a year according to Forbes magazine.

For Fox, Trump’s defeat was almost as painful as it was for Trump himself. After the election, its ratings fell sharply. In January, for the first time in two decades, it trailed behind the other two cable news channels, CNN and MSNBC. The day the Capitol was stormed, January 6, was CNN’s most watched day in the network’s history, and Fox only pulled just over half as many viewers (8.2 million to 4.6 million).Indeed, the attack on the Capitol caught the Fox commentariat off balance and the network has been entertaining two contradictory theories since. The first is that it was a “false flag” operation mounted by far left groups masquerading as Trump supporters; the other is that the rioters were “solid Americans” and “deeply frustrated” (Tucker Carlson) and the “majority of them were peaceful” (Hannity).

None of Fox’s prime-time stars has yet blamed Trump for his role in inciting the riot. But they know others’ reports are wrong. Carlson asserted “they [unspecified] are lying to you” about the attacks. “The known facts bear no resemblance to the story they’re telling – they’re just flat out lying.” So that takes care of that.