The Coming Decline of Fox News

Why did they put it in writing?

I come back to that question every time something new pops up on the wires about Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News. Endless commentary (mine included) has dwelled on the audacity of Fox hosts and managers in credulously airing allegations they believed to be false about a matter as grave as the integrity of a presidential election.

But the most audacious part, which is less often noted, is that they expressed their doubts in written communications to each other. 

They must have known those communications would be discoverable if they were sued. If they didn’t, in-house counsel at Fox would have clued them in. To all appearances, they never thought to ask. Why?

I can only guess that Fox’s institutional culture had created a collective blind spot to the perils of smearing people. They’ve been the top-rated cable news network for a gajillion years; they make money hand over fist reassuring their right-wing audience that their beliefs are correct in all particulars; and they enjoy fantastically robust legal immunity from slander suits under New York Times v. Sullivan.

In that context, and in the heat of a moment when the American right was clamoring for reassurance that Trump hadn’t really lost to Joe Biden, it makes sense that the Fox brain trust might have worried more about competitive pressures from the likes of Newsmax than the off chance that they would one day need to fork over $1.6 billion for saying the same stuff practically every other “news” outlet on the right was saying at the time.

It also makes sense to assume that Fox’s behavior will change if it ends up losing this lawsuit. I certainly think it will. Specifically, the people who work there will take care not to put it in writing the next time they quietly conspire to smear someone into oblivion.

Win or lose, though, it’s likely that Fox’s best days are behind it—and not just for the usual reason, that cable news viewers infamously trend old and are headed for oblivion themselves. In the years to come, it seems probable that Fox will shed either market share or (more) quality or both. In hindsight, the Dominion suit may come to be seen as the moment the network’s influence began to fade.

Here, as with so much else in modern right-wing politics, the incentives point toward things getting worse, not better.

Just as we shouldn’t romanticize the pre-Trump GOP, we shouldn’t romanticize pre-Trump Fox News. 

For decades before the MAGA era, Fox was the place a Republican politician in a jam would go to be “Hannitized.” The network mainstreamed conspiracy theories, most famously when it slotted Glenn Beck into the 5 p.m. hour. Whatever the ideological trend on the American right happened to be at a given moment, Fox would chase it and amplify it without reservation. Interventionism during the Bush era, Tea-Party-ism during the Obama era, America-First-ism during the Trump era—Murdoch’s shop has always followed the herd, a reminder that its core mission was and remains to advocate for its audience’s political priorities, not to provide them with news. Especially when the news happens to contradict those priorities.

Still, it used to be better.

Fox had more people on the news side, like Chris Wallace, Shepard Smith, and Carl Cameron, who were willing to challenge network orthodoxy when the facts undermined it. Bret Baier and Neil Cavuto are still there, but the ranks have thinned. The conspiratorial content has grown darker too in the age of Trump, particularly after Tucker Carlson replaced Bill O’Reilly at 8 p.m. It was Tucker’s alternate history of January 6 that finally led our own Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg to quit the network, ending a combined 24 years of service as contributors. (Full disclosure: Steve and Jonah have each been subpoenaed in the Dominion lawsuit.) If you happened to tune into Fox last night you found Carlson still at it more than a year later, promising fans that he’s unearthed video that’ll soon prove the government is “lying” about the insurrection.

Whether Fox was always this terrible or has grown more terrible over time reminds me of yesterday’s debate over whether Trump or DeSantis as president would be worse. If your politics are liberal, chances are you believe the right has been rotten for ages and is merely dressing up that essential rottenness in different political hats. If your politics are conservative, you’re more sensitive to how the right has changed because your feelings about it have changed. Trump is worse than what came before him; Fox is worse than it used to be.

“A victory in court for Dominion could change that, though,” you might say. Sure, in theory.

Imagine Fox loses at trial and has to pay a 10-figure judgment to its opponent. As favorable as the Sullivan standard on defamation is to news organizations, a win for Dominion would serve notice that you can’t freely publish information about a public figure if you doubt its accuracy, even if your audience prefers the lie to the truth. You can envision Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch calling an all-hands meeting of Fox staffers after the verdict and proclaiming that such a failure can never happen again, if only because the company can’t afford it. “From now on, we tell the uncomfortable truth no matter what,” they sonorously declare. Fox resolves to chart a new course toward integrity.

It could happen! Except … no, it really couldn’t.

More so than the departures of figures like Wallace and the arrivals of figures like Carlson, the reason Fox has devolved is that the media landscape has changed. In a universe where the network remained the only major source of conservative news outside of talk radio, as was largely the case 20 years ago, it could have reported the truth about Trump’s “rigged election” escapades without needing to worry much about how viewers would react. Those viewers would have been furious, no doubt—but where would they have gone? They might have boycotted the network for a while, but they would have come back. For conservatives, Fox was the only game in town.

In a universe where Fox competes not just with talk radio, not just with Newsmax, not just with mega-sites like The Daily Wire, Breitbart, and Gateway Pundit, but with populist Republican politicians who’ve fashioned their own media “brands,” how could the network possibly succeed financially by telling the uncomfortable truth? It would be completely out-demagogued by smaller rivals whose pockets aren’t as deep, who know they’re less likely to be sued when they post sensational smears.

Losing to Dominion might force Fox to change how its employees communicate in-house and to be a bit more circumspect in its language when promoting the populist conspiracy theory du jour, but intense competitive pressure from other arms of right-wing media will continue to drag it toward promoting misinformation. Either Fox will allow itself to be dragged, further degrading the quality of its programming, or it’ll staunchly resist and begin to lose chunks of its audience to less scrupulous rivals—just as it feared might happen during the post-election period.

Decline, either way.

Let me illustrate their dilemma. If you were an executive at Fox, what would you do once you saw this talking point begin to circulate?

You read The Dispatch so you already know that Greene is lying about what Zelensky said. But Republicans as esteemed as the senior U.S. senator from Utah were taken in by the bowdlerized video to which she’s referring because it happened to jibe with the anti-anti-Putin position that populists have staked out on Ukraine. “Zelensky wants our boys to die for his country!” is now orthodoxy on certain parts of the right. How would you, the Fox executive, address that?

You might air the bowdlerized video yourself despite knowing that it’s false. Zelensky’s not going to sue you for defamation, after all. You might ignore the matter entirely, washing your hands of it while the disinformation spreads among your viewers and generates an appetite for more anti-Ukraine content. Or you might decide to correct the record by showing your viewers the unedited video.

Do you think your viewers would be grateful to you if you chose to tell them the truth? Or, as happened when Fox News correctly called Arizona for Joe Biden on Election Night, do you think they’d resent you for appearing to take sides with “globalists” against great MAGA patriots like Marjorie Taylor Greene?

David French’s point about Fox can’t be stressed enough: The network’s audience expects it to represent the audience’s views on matters like Ukraine in hopes of influencing the rest of the culture, not to represent the views of the rest of the culture in hopes of influencing the Fox News audience even if those views are factually accurate. If you, the Fox executive, insist on doing so then you’re going to lose viewers to competitors who choose differently.

You’ll decline. Whereas if you amplify Greene’s lie or bite your tongue about it, you might retain your audience—but only at the cost of making your network even more openly propagandistic and unreliable than it already is. That’s decline too, just in a different way.

Losing the Dominion suit would lead Fox to get more clever about hiding its doubts about the content it promotes and more cautious about giving airtime to truly zany conspiracy theorists like Sidney Powell. But network executives will never, ever have a change of heart about the key question in the case, whether a publisher should tell its audience what it wants to hear even if doing so requires unfairly disparaging a public figure.

If you doubt that, read this recent New York Times piece. It wasn’t just the likes of Tucker Carlson who complained when certain Fox reporters evinced too much skepticism of Trump’s “rigged election” campaign. Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch did too. The network’s worst conspiracy cranks weren’t “going rogue” by promoting Trump’s lies on the air; they fed the viewers nonsense because Fox management agreed that a certain amount of nonsense was good for business, all the way to the very top.

And needless to say, should the network prevail over Dominion at trial, it’ll have every incentive to go whole hog on propaganda going forward. A Fox victory would stand for the proposition that it’s essentially impossible under the Sullivan standard to slander a person or entity who enjoys a certain degree of public notoriety; nothing short of ironclad knowledge that an assertion of fact is false would generate liability for a publisher. Freed from fear of future legal trouble by a verdict in Fox’s favor, the race to the bottom among populist media to promote the most sensational inflammatory lies would turn breakneck. Fox has too many resources and too many financial reasons to the contrary to let itself lose that race.

There’s another factor that points to decline at Fox. As a rift opens on the right between Trump supporters and DeSantis supporters, the network risks falling into it. This tweet from a reporter covering CPAC caught my eye.

For once, Bannon isn’t exaggerating. (Much.) Murdoch media turned sour on Trump months ago, hoping to discourage him from launching a third presidential campaign. They’ve taken a shine to the new guy from Florida instead, replete with headlines like “DeFUTURE” after DeSantis won reelection in a landslide in November. When a CNN reporter mentioned the spate of flattering coverage for DeSantis at the time to someone associated with Murdoch media who’s in the know, the reply came back, “It is not an accident.”

As DeSantis has moved toward entering the race and the Dominion suit has revealed how much trouble Trump’s election lies caused Fox, the animosity between Trump and Murdoch’s empire has grown. On Thursday Semafor reported that the powers-that-be at Fox have imposed a “soft ban” on having Trump on. Allegedly some of the prime-time hosts have reached out to his team to try to book him, but to no avail. “The understanding is that they’re [Fox] not to have Trump on for an interview, because the Murdochs have made it pretty clear they want to move on from Trump,” one Republican operative told Semafor. And it’s not just Trump himself who’s banned, it seems: On Friday Mediaite noticed that Trump’s sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, have been recently and uncharacteristically missing in action from the network as well.

Go figure that in the middle of a major defamation lawsuit, Fox doesn’t want to put anyone on the air who might be prone to babbling inanely about “rigged” voting machines.

DeSantis, meanwhile, doesn’t typically deign to grant interviews to “corporate media” but he’s made an exception during his book tour for Murdoch media. Lots of exceptions, I should say. I quote the Times: “As he kicks off a promotional tour for his new memoir (published by Mr. Murdoch’s HarperCollins), Mr. DeSantis took Salena Zito, a conservative columnist at The New York Post (owned by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp), on a tour of his hometown in Florida, and he appeared on Fox News (owned by Mr. Murdoch’s Fox Corp) for interviews with Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, Jesse Watters and the co-hosts of ‘Fox & Friends.’ Excerpts from his memoir appeared in The Post and on FoxNews.com.”

That’s not all. Fox Nation has undertaken to introduce its viewers to the soon-to-be candidate with a special entitled “Who Is Ron DeSantis?” And the governor just gave a rare print interview to The Times of London, a paper controlled by—well, guess.

The battle lines drawn here couldn’t be any clearer. So Trump has declared war.

His comms team is in on the act too:

Oh dear.

We shouldn’t overestimate the risk of a permanent rupture between Trump and Fox. As vicious as he can be to former allies who turn on him, he also seems perpetually ready to welcome them back once they re-pledge their loyalty and admit the error of their ways. “Sloppy Steve” Bannon was un-personed by Trump in 2018 after he was quoted complaining about the Trump campaign’s contact with Russian figures during the 2016 campaign. But Bannon spent the next two years making amends by re-positioning himself as a staunch ally and ended up receiving an executive pardon from Trump in the final hours of his presidency.

Trump might similarly forgive Murdoch and Fox for their “disloyalty” down the road, in other words, assuming he defeats DeSantis in the primary and Murdoch’s platforms atone by reverting to ardent MAGA cheerleaders for the general election. But there’s also reason to believe he won’t: It’s not hard to imagine the primary turning exceptionally nasty, with Fox boosting DeSantis all the way, only to have the governor fall just short in the end. In that scenario, Trump’s resentment toward the network for nearly sabotaging his last chance at a second term might abide. He could opt to punish Fox for its “soft ban” with a “soft ban” of his own, giving interviews only to right-wing outlets not owned by Rupert Murdoch. (Remember what his favorite Bible verse is.)

His fans might take a cue from him and tune out. A chunk of Fox’s audience would switch to more “loyal” outfits like Newsmax to punish the network for having backed the wrong horse.

If DeSantis ended up prevailing in the primary with Fox’s help, the animosity would grow deeper and more bitter. Should Trump be denied his dream of returning to power in part because Rupert Murdoch threw his considerable weight behind someone else, the grudge he bears will be eternal. In the aftermath of a DeSantis victory he’ll declare vendettas against everyone who had a hand in “cheating” him, Fox foremost among them. Fox’s image as a treacherous “globalist” outfit would be cemented among Trump fans, who view major media less in terms of left and right than loyal and disloyal.

No matter how the race shakes out, in other words, for Fox the likely result is decline. Perhaps a slight and temporary one, perhaps not.

Andrew Sullivan put it succinctly: “The great and obvious flaw in the political right’s legitimate criticism of mainstream media bias is that the most dishonest, cynical, postmodern, post-truth, ‘everything-is-power’ media enterprise is Fox News.” That’s correct, but with the important caveat that it’s that way because the political right wants it that way.

I don’t see how Fox can regain its integrity while retaining its audience, just as I don’t see how the Republican Party can do so. Either one can choose to do the right thing and sink into irrelevance as their constituents flee for more simpatico, less responsible mouthpieces or each can do the wrong thing and retain their market share for a while longer, at great civic cost. However they choose—and there’s really no mystery about that—this trajectory ends badly for the country.

You know the rule. We don’t know what comes next, but it’s a safe bet that whatever does will be worse. Happy Friday.