In the days following the 2020 election, Rupert Murdoch, the chair of Fox Corp and executive chairman of News Corp, was worried about one of his most lucrative businesses. Fox News had been the first major network to call Arizona for Joe Biden on Election Night, a brutal blow to Donald Trump’s reëlection hopes, and Fox viewers weren’t happy. “@FoxNews daytime ratings have completely collapsed,” Trump tweeted. “Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose.”
Two days after the Arizona call, the anchor Bret Baier e-mailed Fox News’ president, Jay Wallace, to suggest retracting it. “It’s hurting us,” he wrote, proposing that the network put the state “back in his column,” referring to Trump. A few days after the election was called for Biden, Baier texted Wallace and his fellow-anchor Martha MacCallum that he was “trying to focus on the memes not the Fox hating.” MacCallum was similarly glum. “I can’t look at any of it anymore,” she wrote. “I’m watching the Queens Gambit, good escape.”
Murdoch was sending unhappy messages to the network’s C.E.O., Suzanne Scott. “Getting creamed by CNN!” he wrote to her the day after Biden was declared the winner. “Guess our viewers don’t want to watch it.” That same day, Tucker Carlson texted the Fox News producer Gavin Hadden: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire.” Hadden was soothing. “Hopefully just a moment in time,” he wrote. “We will just ride on your shoulders.” Carlson was still jittery. “With Trump behind it,” he wrote, “an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”
During the past few weeks, such texts and e-mails from Fox News hosts have been made public in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox, which claims that the network knowingly aired false allegations that the election was stolen from Trump, at least in part, with the help of Dominion’s products. “I hate him passionately,” Carlson said of Trump in one text message. According to Laura Ingraham, another of the network’s prime-time hosts, Trump’s attorney Sidney Powell, who peddled election lies on the network, was “a bit nuts.” Fox News’ lawyers have argued that Dominion has taken the communications out of context and “has not even identified any defamatory statement of fact . . . attributable to Fox News.” Much of the non-Fox News media, meanwhile, has crowed at tangible evidence of the network’s duplicitous coverage and speculated about whether any of it will force Fox News to reform. “The documents lay bare that the channel’s business model is not based on informing its audience, but rather on feeding them content—even dangerous conspiracy theories—that keeps viewers happy and watching,” CNN’s Oliver Darcy wrote. Margaret Sullivan, in a column for the Guardian, asked if a Fox News loss in the lawsuit might “make coverage more responsible.”
But, despite the bad headlines, Fox News has little incentive to change its ways. For one thing, the network’s loyal audience is likely to remain glued to their screens, especially as a contested G.O.P. Presidential primary plays out on-air over the next two years. Thanks to that audience, the rate that Fox News charges cable companies to carry its shows is the highest among cable-news providers. So long as its ratings remain high, the network can negotiate fat fees. There’s been some suggestion that the recent disclosures about Fox News hosts’ conversations behind the scenes, particularly a seemingly shared disregard for Trump among some of them, could erode viewership numbers. But a cable executive I spoke with seemed confident that the network would remain largely unaffected. “The audience is not going anywhere,” they said. “Fox may be forced to read an apology on air or something, but the audience still loves the product. It’s basically the W.W.E. for this kind of world.”
What’s more, Fox News’ parent company has pursued a successful, if conservative, fiscal strategy in the past few years. As other media companies rushed to acquire more and more properties—bigger is thought to be better in the subscription video-streaming wars—Fox Corp decided to offload. In 2019, its deal to sell Twenty-first Century Fox to Disney netted the company $71.3 billion. Since then, Fox Corp has focussed on a niche strategy of live sports and news. When the company did get into the streaming business, it was on a more moderate scale. Fox Nation, which launched in 2018, was meant to be a supplement for Fox News’ most dedicated viewers; it reportedly has around 1.5 million subscribers. Fox Corp’s bigger streaming success has been with Tubi, an ad-supported streaming service that the company purchased in 2020 for four hundred and forty million dollars. It’s not a premium product like HBO Max or Disney+—Tubi streams shows such as “Duck Dynasty” and “Fear Factor”—but it’s proved to be a steady source of growth. Fox has reportedly turned down multiple two-billion-dollar offers to purchase the service.
Of course, a loss in the Dominion trial would have an impact. Dominion is seeking $1.6 billion in damages, and Fox is facing a similar lawsuit from Smartmatic, another voting-tech company, which is claiming $2.7 billion in damages. Assuming the Dominion case goes to trial next month instead of settling out of court—something that close watchers of the proceedings think is more and more likely—Fox risks a hefty financial burden. Although Dominion might get only a fraction of the $1.6 billion in compensatory damages if it wins at trial—essentially, revenue the company can prove that it lost because of the defamation—Sandy Bohrer, a former partner at a large law firm who defended defamation suits for decades, said that the network could face huge exposure on punitive damages. “It’s a very, very unsympathetic defendant,” he said. “I have never seen this bad a case for a defendant. Ever.” A number of law firms are already soliciting to file suits on behalf of Fox Corp shareholders. Even still, Fox could likely absorb a sum in the billions without bankrupting its business.
But Fox News could still find itself imperilled if its pro-Trump audience turns against some of its biggest stars, such as Carlson. In one of the released messages, Carlson called Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer.” Two days before the January 6th riot at the Capitol, he texted Hadden that “we are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights” and lamented what they had felt forced to do for the previous four years. “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest,” Carlson texted. “But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.” So far, though, Trump and Carlson are playing nice. Trump recently posted angry messages about Murdoch on Truth Social, but he had only kind things to say about Carlson’s special report on previously unseen video footage from the January 6th riot, which was shared with him exclusively by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The report was criticized as misleading and damaging by the Capitol Police chief and by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “He doesn’t hate me, or at least, not anymore!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, of Carlson.
The network also remains vulnerable to a bevy of media outlets that are trying to outflank it on the right, including Newsmax and OAN. “None of them can replace Fox, but all of them can take away little pieces of the audience,” Brian Stelter, a former CNN anchor who wrote a book on Fox News’ symbiotic relationship with Trump, said. These smaller outlets could present the text messages and e-mails from the Dominion filings as proof that Fox News actually disdains the Republican Party’s hard-right base. And now there is a minefield of a Presidential primary to navigate, in which Fox News will need to decide how frequently to feature Trump or Ron DeSantis or any other would-be Trump rival.
But if the disclosures in the Dominion case have revealed anything it’s that, for Fox News, there’s no money in tacking to the center. Consistently, the network has shied away from covering political realities that would upset its audience. In the wake of the riot on the Capitol, Ingraham suggested on her show that the violence was in part to blame on Antifa agitators, and Carlson, in his own producer’s words, spent his show on January 6th “beating around the bush” about what was actually happening. For all the behind-the-scenes hand-wringing at Fox News about the dangerous untruths being spread by Trump in the wake of the 2020 election, the programming tone never really shifted. “Is it ‘unarguable that high profile Fox voices fed tha story that the election was stolen and that January 6th [was] an important chance to have the result overturned’? Maybe Sean and Laura went too far,” Murdoch wrote to Scott, in January, 2021. “All very well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump but what did he tell his viewers?” Even though Murdoch has admitted that he didn’t believe the election was fraudulent, he allowed his network to continue pushing falsehoods. (A Fox News spokesperson pointed to dozens of on-air instances that provided what they called accurate coverage of the election’s aftermath and January 6th, and, in a statement, Fox News called Dominion’s suit “nothing more than another flagrant attack on the First Amendment.”)
At this point, the only thing that might trigger an internal reckoning about the role of Fox News in American civil life is the departure of its owner. Murdoch, who is ninety-two, is a committed conservative, as is his eldest son and preferred successor, Lachlan. In his deposition, Lachlan spoke of his faith in the power of the network to withstand the post-election turbulence. “I know I felt that the brand was strong enough, that this would be a temporary dip and we would get through it,” he said. He mentioned that Fox’s “The Five” was one of his favorite shows. Dominion’s attorney asked him if it “sounded plausible” to him at the time of the 2020 election “that a voting-machine company that had been certified by the government had actually been founded in Venezuela to rig elections for Hugo Chavez?” Lachlan answered, “It didn’t sound implausible.”
But there is a speculative scenario in which, at some point in the future, Murdoch’s youngest son, James, makes a play for the top spot and outmaneuvers Lachlan by securing the support of two of his sisters, Prudence and Elisabeth. (Yes, this is the stuff that premier-cable dreams are made of.) James and his wife donated to various democracy organizations and Democratic causes during the Trump years, and his sisters are thought to be more politically aligned with him. Elisabeth was a Barack Obama supporter; Prudence, who’s largely stayed out of the limelight, is a little more difficult to peg. Perhaps, with the help of his sisters, James could restructure Fox, dialling back its most extreme rhetoric to create a network that is center-right, with politics more in line with something like the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Of course, he would have to persuade the company’s board to go along with the plan, which seems like a stretch, given the success of Fox Corp in its current iteration. One former Fox executive seemed skeptical that such a shift would happen. “Trump has so crazed both the left and the right,” they said. “Extremists screaming at each other gets quicker ratings.” ♦
