From a Washington Post story by Sarah Ellison and Jeremy Barr headlined “What happens to Fox News if Trump loses? Rupert Murdoch is prepared.”:
Spend a couple hours with Fox News on a typical weeknight, and you may come to see the potential election of Joe Biden as a cataclysm in the making.
Prime-time host Laura Ingraham recently warned her viewers of the “Bolsheviks and billionaires” she said were propelling his candidacy. Frequent contributor Dan Bongino called Biden’s campaign “the biggest con job in presidential election history.”. . .
But behind the scenes, a strange calm prevails. The man who helped create Fox News as the most influential platform for conservative politics in America fully expects that Biden will win — and frankly isn’t too bothered by that.
Rupert Murdoch, the 89-year-old billionaire whose family controls Fox News’s parent company, has told associates that he is resigned to a Trump loss in November. . . .
A political conservative, Murdoch has always been a pragmatist when it comes to his relationships with politicians, backing liberal candidates, such as former British prime minister Tony Blair, when it suits him. He had known Trump for decades as a frequent source and subject for his New York Post tabloid, and he was not initially thrilled with the idea of a Trump presidency. “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” he tweeted in July 2015. . . .
When Trump’s candidacy surged, Murdoch followed and was rewarded with a direct line to the White House. Last year, the mogul sold most of his company to Disney for $71 billion, a deal that ended up facing few federal regulatory hurdles despite its size. Trump called Murdoch the day the deal was announced to congratulate him. . . .
But the coronavirus pandemic altered the relationship. Murdoch watched with concern as Trump downplayed the crisis and dispatched one of his closest aides, News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson, to speak to the president about the risks of the virus back in March, in a previously undisclosed meeting. Tucker Carlson, a prominent Fox News host who had sounded the alarm on the virus back in late January, visited Mar-a-Lago in early March to urge the president to take the virus more seriously, also at Murdoch’s encouragement. . . .
Carlson, after a period of urging viewers to take the virus seriously, soon pivoted to skepticism, comparing those worried about it to “the many ghouls in Washington who forced our military to wage pointless wars.”. . .
In October, Fox News’s prime-time audience was bigger than any other program on cable, and had more viewers than ABC’s “The Bachelorette” and “Celebrity Family Feud” and NBC’s “The Weakest Link.”
But what about 2021?
The network’s current lineup is a reflection of the Trump presidency, with opinion hosts such as Hannity, Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro, who have leveraged their personal relationships with the president for ratings success. . . .
If Biden wins, that access disappears. Yet Murdoch has always considered Fox News’s original underdog status to be its strength. And while he valued the White House access, he is ready to welcome a new inhabitant — partly because it may give Fox the central role in the Republican Party that it occupied before Trump co-opted the party.
“Fox thrives when it is in the opposition because they have a real-time bad guy to beat up on,” said Jonathan Klein, a former president of CNN. “A Biden win would be great for Fox’s business.”
One Murdoch executive envisions the Fox prime-time lineup emerging as “the standard-bearer of the resistance” under a Biden administration. And former Fox executives point to the network’s role in championing the tea party movement in the Obama years as a model for how the network could find a way forward should Trump lose in November.
“If anything, I think they will be more successful,” said Sean Graf, who worked at Fox for the news division’s well-regarded research staff before leaving in January 2020. “There’s going to be an audience for Biden controversy.”. . .
The greater risk for Fox News, as exists for all cable news outlets post-Trump, is that with the frenetic atmosphere of the Trump administration gone, viewers will be less likely to tune in altogether. Conservative media typically operates better when it is attacking rather than defending — but Trump broke that model because of the media’s addiction to his every tweet and scandal. Biden may also be an exception.
“He’s so boring and engenders so little enthusiasm on both sides of the political spectrum that it’s going to be hard to find narratives to program against him,” said one veteran conservative media executive. . . .
Behind-the-scenes staffers at the Fox News Media networks say that most people who work on the news side of the company are not pulling for either Trump or Biden. Rather, they’re just exhausted from covering Trump’s frenetic first term.
Hannity, who has prospered from the president’s eagerness to appear on his show, may be the Fox pundit facing the most awkward pivot from a Trump presidency. . . .
But Fox veterans say that news-side stars, such as Bret Baier and Chris Wallace, would fare far better, having cultivated relationships with Democrats. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer just appeared on Wallace’s “Fox News Sunday,” where the Democrat blamed Trump for rhetoric that encouraged a failed attempt to kidnap her.
Lachlan Murdoch has expressed confidence that a Biden presidency would not hurt the company’s bottom line. “We’ve grown ratings in multiple administrations, from both political parties,” he said at a conference in September. Indeed, Fox News has been the No. 1 cable news network since 2002. . . .
The elder Murdoch has stopped speaking as frequently as he once did with Trump, but his associates say that those conversations probably will pick up again after Nov. 3, when Trump will either be a second-term president or a free agent on the media circuit.
“Maybe Rupert can just back the truck up and pay Trump to appear on Fox’s air at will,” Klein said. “Trump might prefer that to the rigors of having to actually run an actual business.”
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Sarah Ellison is a staff writer based in New York for The Washington Post. Previously, she wrote for Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, where she started as a news assistant in Paris.
Jeremy Barr covers breaking news about the media industry for The Washington Post.
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