“He’s got basically a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media — Fox News, the web sites, all the stuff — they just don’t hold him accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers,” [DeSantis] said of Donald Trump. “And they don’t want to have their ratings go down.”Rupert Murdoch has called Trump "a fucking idiot." He dispatched Megyn Kelly to destroy Trump's candidacy in a 2015 debate; her attack on Trump backfired. On Election Night 2020, Murdoch personally approved Fox's early call of Arizona for Joe Biden, reportedly adding, in reference to Trump, "Fuck him." And then in 2022 and 2023 there was DeSantis-mania.
... One unmentioned irony is that a large chunk of this very same conservative-media apparatus used to work for DeSantis. After January 6, when Republicans assumed Trump was radioactive, conservative media set out to wean the base off Trump and get them hooked on DeSantis. “We want to make Trump a nonperson,” Rupert Murdoch wrote to a colleague. “We see [DeSantis] as the future of the party,” a Fox News producer wrote in an email obtained by the Tampa Bay Times. For a period of time from after the insurrection to the middle of last year, conservative media promoted DeSantis infomercial-style.
The flaw in the formula was that the dogs weren’t eating the dog food....
And so last summer, Fox News and the rest of the conservative media gave up on DeSantis and resumed promoting Trump. The reason is exactly as DeSantis said: They didn’t want to alienate their audience and lose market share by telling the audience anything bad about its hero.
None of this worked for Fox. And yet Fox is still the dominant force in the right-wing media, and in cable news in general.
Fox is starting to seem like Microsoft or Facebook/Meta. Fox makes terrible business decisions (think of DeSantis as the Clippy of Fox News), but it can pivot quickly, stealing the ideas of people who have a better sense of the marketplace and reselling them. Microsoft gradually made its operating system more and more like Apple's. Facebook bought Instagram and launched a fake Twitter called Threads. Fox reluctantly got on the Trump train in 2016, staying with him for four years. When Trump wouldn't go quietly after the 2020 election, Fox pushed election denial; this cost Fox quite a bit of money, but it probably preserved Fox's credibility among its base viewers. Between elections, Fox picked up on the "critical race theory" bashing of Christopher Rufo and the transphobia of Libs of TikTok. (This is also reminiscent of how Madonna picked up on existing subcultures -- vogueing, S&M -- and resold them as her own in the 1980s and 1990s.) And now it's back to Trumpism.
Fox's dominant position in the marketplace allows it to miss the trends and then catch up later. It probably won't see the first post-Trump GOP presidential nominee coming either (assuming we still have elections then). But it'll quickly get on board.
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