Fox News might have finally outfoxed itself

The channel has been caught in the crossfire of the battle for the Republican Party’s soul

Commentator Tucker Carlson has embraced Trumpist far-right election conspiracies (Getty Images)

There’s long been at least one story on which Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News could be relied upon for the veracity of its coverage: the ratings. There was no need for its commentators to talk about conspiracies, cancel cultures or wars on Christmas at Nielsen because the unbiased information delivered by the company was, for years, to Fox’s advantage. It consistently showed the network looking in the rearview mirror at cable news rivals CNN and MSNBC and it had been that way for nigh on 20 years, since the beginning of 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks.

The times they are a-changin'. The latest batch saw all three cable networks spinning furiously, focusing on prime time, or key demographics, or weekend vs weekdays, or whether you should look at the year-on-year or the week-on-week performance.

But amid the smoke, mirrors, lies, damned lies and statistics, one thing was clear. Fox was on its downers and its rivals were on their uppers.

The channel that did so much to create the conditions for Donald Trump before enthusiastically embracing him, only to find itself outflanked by even more slavish sycophants on the right, is now caught on the horns of a nasty dilemma.

Having been battered by a fusillade of Twitter-bricks from the former president during the election campaign, in which he rounded on the network for being insufficiently loyal and urged his followers to defect to Newsmax or One America News, Fox is now caught in the crossfire of the battle for the Republican Party’s soul.

On one side is the establishment wing, embodied by Liz Cheney, the third-ranking member of the congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment, on the other, the conspiracy wing, whose current flag bearer is Majorie Taylor Greene. That would be the former QAnon-backing Taylor Greene, who has previously claimed school shootings were ‘false flag’ operations, harassed survivors and suggested California wildfires were caused by a space laser built by Jewish financiers.

Fox has attempted to find some safe ground in attacking the Biden administration and railing against “cancel culture”. But even that hardy perennial isn’t working out as well as it used to.

NewsHounds – tagline “we watch Fox so you don’t have to” – recently highlighted a remarkable interview the channel conducted with pundit Jonah Goldberg. In it, the contributor, columnist and former editor at the conservative National Review said that there was a “vast and thriving right-wing cancel culture” in addition to the liberal one.

He allowed that “there are people who want to see Fox nuked from orbit and I think that’s ridiculous”. But he went on: “At the same time, it should not be surprising, and you’re right to single out the news division as different, but it should not be surprising when people from the opinion division perpetuate lies about the election being stolen, who are more concerned about cancelling Liz Cheney than they are about cancelling Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

One wonders how long Goldberg will retain his contributor status after that.

That piece aired shortly after a devastating op-ed in The LA Times from Chris Stirewalt, the former Fox News political editor, who correctly called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night.

In the aftermath, Stirewalt was confronted with the “murderous rage” of Trump supporters, furious at not having their views confirmed. This, he said, was a “tragic consequence of the informational malnourishment so badly afflicting the nation” driven by ratings data so granular that producers can see what’s grabbing eyeballs from minute to minute and tailor coverage to their prejudices.

That data is what seems to have informed Fox’s strategy in response to the pitched battle for the soul of American conservatism. It has doubled down on its opinion hosts while purging “news” staffers like Stirewalt. The company claimed his job was lost through a “restructuring”. Critics used the word “purge”.

Now, Fox’s ratings slide may prove temporary. News site Deadline had a good analysis of the claims and counterclaims but it seems clear that CNN has the most reason to be happy.

Why’s that significant? CNN is by far the best at news, and major breaking news in particular. There was an awful lot of news in January.

So maybe Fox can win back some of its losses when there’s less news about and more appetite for manufactured outrage. But maybe it won’t. It was notable that the liberal-leaning MSNBC host Rachel Maddow was thrashing Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, in the most recent top 10.

Fox, and especially Murdoch, given the importance of this financial juggernaut to his business, have a problem. When the channel cemented its position as the big dog of US cable news during George W Bush’s presidency, the Republican Party was broadly united. It was very right-wing compared to most of its European peers, even the British Tories, and had the capacity to be quite unpleasant. But it was still recognisable as a more or less mainstream centre-right party.

That’s no longer the case. Fox’s data may be telling it that embracing its far-right Trumpist fringe embodied by Taylor Greene is the way to go for ratings, but in following that path it will find itself in competition for a share of a smaller and more crowded market while alienating some of its traditional conservative viewers, aghast at what has happened to their party and horrified by events such as the US capitol riots. It will also sacrifice the limited credibility it had.

There’s also the small matter of the billion-dollar-plus libel lawsuits filed by voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion centring on the baseless claims aired on Fox and others that they helped steal an election from Trump that the Republicans lost by a large margin.

Could it be that the network and Murdoch have finally outfoxed themselves?