Fox lurches further to the right to win back
‘hard-edge’ Trump supporters
Hosts have dabbled in conspiracy theories and
aggressively attacked the Joe Biden administration as network’s ratings drop
Adam
Gabbatt
@adamgabbatt
Fri 5 Feb
2021 07.00 GMT
For two
decades, Fox News has reigned supreme as America’s number one cable news
channel. Until January, that is, when the network dropped to a once unthinkable
third place in the ratings.
The
response from Fox News has not been a period of sombre self-reflection.
Instead, the network seems to have made a chaotic lunge towards the right wing
in recent weeks as hosts have dabbled in conspiracy theories and aggressively
attacked the Joe Biden administration.
Adding to
the sense of crisis, Fox News laid off multiple staff in January – including
the political editor who backed the network’s early decision that Biden had won
Arizona – while on Thursday Smartmatic, an election technology company, filed a
$2.7bn lawsuit against Fox News’ parent company, over allegations it
participated in election fraud.
As CNN and
MSNBC, with their more liberal audiences rose to the top spots in January’s
ratings, Americans who believe in the nonsensical QAnon conspiracy theory, or
who harbor white nationalist beliefs, or who don’t trust vaccines, have all
found themselves pandered to by Fox News, as it attempts to shore up its
viewership.
Nielsen
numbers, published this week, found that Fox News ranked third out of the three
main cable news channels in January. It was the first time since 2001 that Fox
News found itself in third place, and continued a pattern from the end of 2020,
when Donald Trump urged his supporters to abandon Fox News in favor of even
more rightwing rivals like NewsMax and One America News.
“Fox News
has led in the ratings for two decades. They have historically been unrivaled
in attracting an audience,” said Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at the
progressive media watchdog Media Matters.
Gertz said
he had detected a shift at Fox as the network attempts to win back “the most
hard-edge” Trump supporters.
“The
network really needs to win them back. It’s of great concern for Fox if they’re
no longer in first place. It’s not going to be possible for them to command the
same ad rates, it’s not going to be possible for them to demand the same fees
from cable carriers,” he said.
Gertz
added: “Their business model really rests on them being number one, in a big
way, and it appears they’re going to do anything they can to win that status
back.”
The plan to
boost viewership so far seems to be based on an extremist push, led by its most
prominent opinion hosts.
Tucker
Carlson, whose show is the most watched in cable news, is among those leading
the charge. After Democrats called for a crackdown on white nationalists and
domestic terrorism following a wave of extremist attacks, Carson had an
interesting, and revealing, take for his audience.
“They’re
talking about you,” Carson told his viewers on 26 January.
A day
earlier, Carlson had defended QAnon, a racist and antisemitic conspiracy theory
linked to multiple violent acts, including alleged kidnappings, the derailing
of a train and arrests over threats to politicians.
Carlson
played a series of clips from left-leaning networks, in which analysts
described QAnon as a dangerous, “frightening” conspiracy theory. The FBI has
agreed with that sentiment, and warned of its dangers.
Carlson,
however, was having none of it. He proceeded to stand up for QAnon supporters,
as he claimed that believing in and espousing QAnon ideas is an issue of free
speech.
“No
democratic government can ever tell you what to think. Your mind belongs to
you. It is yours and yours alone,” Carlson said.
Carlson’s
colleagues Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, Fox News’s two other biggest stars,
have waded into similar waters.
Ingraham
noted that the government was looking into radicalization of some members of
the military. She played a clip from a rival news channel where a commentator
noted: “We can’t stand by idly and see people in uniform whether its law
enforcement or military have QAnon patches on.”
Ingraham’s
take? “This is absolutely poisonous for the country,” she said.
It’s not
just white nationalism and QAnon that are getting airtime on Fox News. Hannity
has been accused of dabbling in anti-vaxx ideas, after he hemmed and hawed over
whether he would get vaccinated – citing skeptical friends of his in what
seemed like an effort to appeal to anti-vaxxers watching.
“I don’t
know when my number gets called, I’m actually beginning to have doubts,”
Hannity told his audience on 26 January. “I’ve been telling my friends I’m
gonna get the vaccine,” he said. “Half of them agree and the other half think
I’m absolutely nuts. They wouldn’t take it in a million years.”
Hannity
added: “I don’t know who to listen to.”
Fox News
has been floundering since earning the animus of many viewers on election
night. It was the first news outlet to announce Biden had won Arizona – it
would be days before most TV channels and newspapers made that call – and Trump
was furious.
So were his
supporters. “Fox News Sucks!” Trump voters chanted at a vote-counting center in
Arizona, and conservative social media were rife with people saying they were
turning off Fox News. Trump even demanded on his now defunct Twitter account
that people ditch Fox News and instead watch NewsMax and OAN.
The trend
to the hard right hasn’t just come from the primetime stars. In January, CNN’s
media correspondent, Brian Stelter, noted: “Tucker Carlson Tonight essentially
expanded to Tucker Carlson Day and Night.”
“Part of
their strategy in the wake of losing parts of audience has been to de-emphasise
the news side and really start bringing opinion side voices into the news
hours,” Gertz said. “You see Fox opinion hosts being guests on those news
programs as well.”
Some of the
moves Fox News has made in recent weeks seem to illustrate a de-emphasis on
“straight news”. On 19 January, the day before Biden’s inauguration, the
network fired Chris Stirewalt, the Fox News political editor who was the public
face of the Arizona call. A Fox News spokesperson declined to comment on the Stirewalt
decision, citing employee confidentiality.
The same
day, Fox News laid off more than a dozen digital reporters – seen as relatively
non-partisan journalists. A spokesperson for the network said it had “realigned
its business and reporting structure to meet the demands of this new era”.
Even Fox
News’s less firebrand, daytime news anchors have courted controversy.
After it
emerged that Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist Republican congresswoman who
has expressed QAnon beliefs, had also suggested the Parkland, Florida, school
shooting was a false flag and claimed that California forest fires had been
started by Jewish space lasers, she found a defender in the Fox News anchor
Bill Hemmer, who claimed a false equivalence between Greene and the Democrat
Ilhan Omar.
In the long
term, Fox News isn’t likely to go anywhere – even despite the Smartmatic
lawsuit.
“Fox News
Media is committed to providing the full context of every story with in-depth
reporting and clear opinion. We are proud of our 2020 election coverage and
will vigorously defend this meritless lawsuit in court,” a spokesperson said.
In terms of
viewers, Newsmax, Fox News’s most ideologically similar competitor, averaged
247,000 daily viewers in January, far lower than its bigger rival. Fox News has
also experienced dips in viewership following previous inaugurations – although
during those dips it never fell behind CNN or MSNBC.
Still, a
Fox News spokesperson pointed to Nielsen ratings which showed Fox News
outperformed CNN and MSNBC during primetime hours in the last week of January,
while internal research conducted by Fox News, which was shared with the
Guardian, suggests viewers seemed to be taking a break from news altogether in
January – although several programs on CNN and MSNBC experienced their best
ratings ever during the same time period.
Overall,
there’s a sense that it didn’t have to be this way.
After Trump
lost the election, media experts predicted Fox News could do well “financially
and politically”, as a sea of agitated viewers seek a network that will mirror,
and augment, their anger at Biden. CNN, MSNBC and other leftwing or centrist news
organizations made huge audience gains during Trump’s presidency, but the same
isn’t yet working for Fox News.
Ultimately,
the struggles at Fox News to represent radical elements of the right wing
mirrors a problem facing the Republican party itself – where Trumpist
politicians like Greene and more establishment figures like Liz Cheney or Mitch
McConnell wrestle for its future.
“Rupert
Murdoch and Fox News generally sees itself as mouthpiece of Republican party.
They were moving away from conspiracy theorists, they were moving away from
Trump and hoping to turn the page,” Jonathan Kaufman, professor and director of
the school of journalism at Northeastern University, said.
“But like
the Republican party, Fox is discovering that Trumpism, and conspiracy
theories, have taken deep root in the Republican party and in their viewers.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário