[CNN’s Brian Stelter on the conservative backlash against Fox
News, the rise of Newsmax, and the bottomless appetite for right-wing
propaganda.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

TRUMP’S WAR ON FOX NEWS AND THE FUTURE OF RIGHT-WING MEDIA  
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Sean Illing
November 13, 2020
Vox
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_ CNN’s Brian Stelter on the conservative backlash against Fox
News, the rise of Newsmax, and the bottomless appetite for right-wing
propaganda. _

A Fox News livestream of President Donald Trump delivering a
statement in Washington, DC, on November 4., Xinhua/Liu Jie via Getty
Images

 

What’s the future of conservative media after Trump?

For as long as most of us can remember, Fox News has been at the
center of the right-wing media world. It’s hard to imagine that
changing anytime soon, but there are early signs that a shake-up is
afoot.

As a recent Washington Post story
[[link removed]] explained,
the “long love affair between Fox News and Trump may be over,”
mostly because the network hasn’t categorically embraced his false
claims
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voter fraud in the 2020 election. To be clear, much of the network’s
coverage is still Trump-friendly, particularly its primetime lineup
that has given oxygen to the baseless narrative that the election was
stolen.

But there have been notable
[[link removed]] moments
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of the network’s journalists have challenged this storyline and
inflamed the diehards. In the past week alone, hundreds of thousands
of viewers have flocked to Newsmax
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a new and decidedly more right-wing channel, looking for more biased
coverage. For now, it’s too soon to say whether this trend will
continue.

If a sizable share of Fox’s audience, which is basically Trump’s
base at this point, does revolt against the network, where would they
go? What other networks might challenge Fox for supremacy on the
right? And how would that change the broader media landscape?

Brian Stelter is a longtime media reporter and the host of
CNN’s _Reliable Sources_. He’s also the author of _Hoax: Donald
Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth_
[[link removed][]vx[e]21321285[t]w[d]D].
I reached out to him to talk about where Fox might go after Trump and
if he thinks the internal struggles at the network are reaching a
boiling point. We also discuss whether Trump will launch his own
right-wing media empire after he leaves office.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

Has Trump changed conservative media in any significant way?

Brian Stelter

When you say conservative media, I think of a human body, with Fox
News as the beating heart, but there are many other parts of
conservative media as well. That body is complicated, right? There are
some aspects of conservative media that are reality-based, and then
there are resentment sites and full-blown conspiracy sites.

But if we’re talking about pro-Trump media, then that’s the big
shift we’ve seen. Obviously there was no pro-Trump media before he
ran for office, and now there’s a vibrant pro-Trump media that
exists in opposition to the rest of the media. And this has evolved
over the last few years, and it has hardened and become more loyal and
more insular.

Sean Illing

Well, it may be too much to say that Trump has been a tipping point
for right-wing media, but his audacity has really dialed everything up
in a way that forced everyone who supports him in the press to go
all-in.

Brian Stelter

Yeah, but this may have been the direction that conservative media was
already heading in, and Trump just sped up the travel. Certainly, I
think Tucker Carlson’s famous call to arms, at [the 2009]
CPAC, urging conservative media to do more reporting
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strengthen newsrooms — so much of that has been left by the wayside.
That call has been forgotten. It’s now entirely about whether
you’re with Trump or against him. Were we always heading in that
direction? Maybe. I don’t know. I have a hard time remembering the
pre-Trump years now.

Sean Illing

People like you focus a lot on the media institutions — what
they’re doing or not doing — but I wonder about the demand side of
this. Audiences, especially on the right, have come to expect a
certain style of journalism, which is all about affirmation and drama
and high-stakes cultural conflict. Even Fox has lost some ability to
control their own product because their consumers are demanding less
news and more propaganda. The Trump years have definitely accelerated
this dynamic.

Brian Stelter

In general, I think that’s right. There are obvious exceptions, but
in reporting my book _Hoax_
[[link removed][]vx[e]21321285[t]w[d]D],
staffers at Fox kept pointing to the audience as the overriding issue.
I wrote toward the end of the book that the audience had been
radicalized, and the anchors did whatever they could to keep up with
their viewers’ demands for propaganda.

Again, there are exceptions to that rule, but it’s clear that
Fox’s audience, at least the extremely online audience, will not
tolerate any dissent. I don’t remember that in the Obama years.
I’m sure it existed to some degree, but I’ve had many staffers at
Fox tell me that their audience has been radicalized much more in the
Trump years. In fact, I remember one veteran staffer said, “I feel
like Fox is being held hostage by its audience.” I get that that
implies that the network is the victim, and not the cause of this
information environment, but that word “hostage” kept coming up in
my reporting.

So I think you’re right — there’s a demand issue here. There are
so many examples of Trump skeptics in Fox who felt they had to get
aboard the train. For some it took longer than others, but it was
about how, not whether, the hosts jumped on the bandwagon, because
they could see that there was no market incentive for them to remain
anti-Trump.

Sean Illing

What even is Fox at this point? I mean, the center has kind of held up
over the last couple weeks, but only barely and probably not for long.

Brian Stelter

I think of Fox as many things in one. It is a news operation. It is a
propaganda operation. It is a virtual community. It is all these
things at the same time, and the news side has been shrinking and the
propaganda side has been growing.

I’m not sure if “tug-of-war” is the best way to describe
what’s happened the past week at Fox. There is this dynamic where
daytime Fox shows are calling Biden the president-elect, but many Fox
nighttime shows undermine that very description. So you’ve even got
opinion shows like _Fox & Friends_ acknowledging the direction this
is headed, and yet other shows are trying to destroy the Biden
presidency before it begins.

What does that add up to in the minds of the viewers? Well, it adds up
to this complicated place, and some Fox viewers are resisting right
now and turning to places like Newsmax or OAN [One America News
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instead, because their coverage is more satisfyingly pro-Trump
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Sean Illing

That’s a big question now, right? Is the Fox base revolting, or are
they just throwing a tantrum?

Brian Stelter

There are signs of revolt, but it’s hard to tell. As we’re talking
now, I’m pulling up Monday’s cable news ratings. Before the
election, I would look at Newsmax’s ratings and chuckle. Sean Spicer
has a show over there and he would get 40,000 or 50,000 viewers a
night, which isn’t even enough to fill a football stadium.

But I’m looking at Monday night’s ratings now and he had 600,000
viewers, and the next show had 800,000 on Newsmax, and the next show
had 600,000. I hadn’t looked at the spreadsheet until now, but I’m
gobsmacked. These shows are up 500 to 1,000 percent from their
pre-election averages.

Now, obviously, ratings are up across the board because it’s an
election, but something’s happening on the right. All of these
networks are still small compared to Fox, and it’s not close, and
yet there’s a real audience shift underway. Fox’s numbers right
now are basically flat compared to what they normally are.

Is this temporary or permanent? I have no idea. It’s too soon to
say, but it does seem that Fox has alienated part of its base.

Sean Illing

Is it conceivable that one of these Fox competitors, like Newsmax or
OAN, eventually supplants Fox News as the tone-setter on the right,
especially if these outlets are even less constrained by journalistic
standards?

Brian Stelter

It’s a real risk to Fox’s bottom line in a way that it was not two
weeks ago. In the last year or so, when I asked Fox staffers about OAN
or Newsmax, the response was usually laughter and mockery. These
channels barely registered on the Nielsen ratings.

The difference now is that we’re in a post-Biden-election world and
some Fox viewers feel betrayed by the network. They feel betrayed by
Fox’s reporting, by Fox’s reality-based observation that Biden is
the president-elect, and so maybe for the first time some Fox viewers
will finally flip their cable dial to another channel.

Sean Illing

What are you hearing now from all your sources over at Fox? Is there a
civil war going on inside the building?

Brian Stelter

It’s really hard to know what’s happening inside these companies
right now because of the pandemic — most people aren’t at the
office talking to each other. But that said, I think there are
different constituency groups within Fox News. There are journalists
who have felt suffocated by the Trump years. There are executives who
are focused on the profits. There are opinion hosts and commentators
and producers who are focused on advancing the agenda. There are
definitely internal skirmishes between the hardcore partisans and the
journalists, and we see this playing out in front of the cameras.

Fox, as a business, makes billions of dollars in profit and it has to
be somewhat reality-based. I know that some folks don’t believe it
when I say that, but in order to appeal to advertisers and strike
deals with cable operators, they cannot put on a broadcast that says
Biden lost. There are just certain tenets of reality that can’t be
denied, but that creates tension with some of these right-wing
commentators who are under pressure from their audiences to deny
reality.

Sean Illing

I’m not sure they can maintain this tension between reality and
unreality. A recent poll shows that 70 percent of Republicans
[[link removed]] think
the election was stolen — _70 percent!_ That’s a crazy number,
Brian, and Fox, to keep its customers happy, will have to indulge that
fantasy moving forward.

But even as I say that now, I realize I’m probably underestimating
the extent to which Fox has always done this and there’s no reason
why they can’t keep doing it.

Brian Stelter

My impression this week is that they are taking Trump’s lawsuits a
lot more seriously than other media outlets. They are leaning heavily
into the possibility of mass voter fraud, where none exists. They are
bringing on so-called whistleblowers who imply that [the election] was
rigged, while also covering the transition.

I mean, I have a hard time even describing this, because it makes no
sense when I say it out loud, but it’s true. It’s what they’re
doing. They are covering Biden, the president-elect, in one breath,
and then they are imagining voter fraud in the next breath. And
remember, Fox is a collection of shows that barely talk to each other.
There’s some cross-pollination, but most of the opinion shows have
awesome autonomy. News anchors like Neil Cavuto will keep doing
reality-based journalism, and Sean Hannity or Mark Levin will keep
doing what they do.

I’d also say that Fox’s brand has been built on the years when it
is against Democrats, and they’re pretty open about this. This is
not something they hide from. It’s something they acknowledge to
advertisers. It’s something they sell to cable operators. They are
the voice of the opposition, and you cannot drop Fox from your cable
lineup because the audience will rebel, because Fox is the only voice
of the opposition. That’s always been the brand.

My working theory before the election was that Fox will have four very
profitable years as the preeminent anti-Biden channel. The question
now is, will enough Fox viewers feel betrayed and look elsewhere?

Sean Illing

All good points, and maybe the operation keeps humming along like it
always has, but for all the demand reasons we discussed earlier, I
think they’re going to have to keep dialing it up and up and up.

Brian Stelter

Neil Cavuto has 1.5 million viewers at 4 pm, because Fox’s viewers
generally don’t want to hear him report the news. Then at 5 pm, the
ratings shoot up to 3 million viewers with the show _The Five_, which
is a pro-Trump talk show with one liberal. The audience doubles when
the opinion guys come on, and then the audience turns away for a while
and comes back in massive numbers for Tucker Carlson.

So the trends are obvious. Fox sees these numbers every day. They know
exactly what their audience wants. This is why they keep pushing in a
Trumpier and Trumpier direction. There’s no reason to think this
will change.

Sean Illing

Before you go, I have to ask you about the possibility of Trump
launching his own TV network to counter Fox. This is something people
have speculated about for years — do you buy it at all?

Brian Stelter

I don’t buy Trump TV because of my belief that Fox is bigger than
Trump, and because of my knowledge that launching a network from
scratch is incredibly difficult and almost impossible in the year
2020. There are some caveats to that, and some reasons why I could be
wrong. Fox seems to have a stranglehold on Trump’s audience, so
maybe Trump ends up with a show on Fox. He bitterly tweets against Fox
from time to time, but he cares deeply about the programming. He’s
obsessed with the programming, and he has lots of friends there.

I’ll put it this way: Why would Trump try to build and open his own
mall when there’s a hyper-successful mall right across the street
and he could have prime real estate right inside it? Why not go where
the shoppers already are?

Sean Illing

Because he loves to put his name on shit! Fox News will always be Fox
News, but Trump TV — that’s the good stuff, baby.

Brian Stelter

It’s possible that Newsmax or OAN would give him what he wants and
put his name on the network, but those channels have a lot less
distribution than Fox News. Even though Newsmax is doing really well
right now, they are not available in nearly as many homes. Which gets
to the root of why it’ll be so hard to launch a network. Cable and
satellite operators are not in the business of adding channels right
now. They’re in the business of subtracting channels. They want to
be carrying fewer channels, as the cable business goes through this
really tumultuous period.

Would a channel from a former president be appealing? Maybe to some
operators in some red states, but I think it would be very hard to get
Comcast or AT&T or Charter to carry a new Trump-branded channel,
especially knowing how more than half the country would react to the
existence of that channel.

It also costs an enormous amount of money; you’d have to have
programming, you’d have to have producers. There are all these
challenges associated with launching a channel from scratch, but
putting his name on something that already exists would be way easier.

He could also turn the Trump campaign webcasts into a streaming
platform and ask people to sign up. Could he go the Netflix route? He
might actually make a lot more money trying to get people to sign up
for his streaming platform than he would with a traditional cable or
satellite channel.

All of this takes an enormous amount of work. Does he want to put in
the effort? Honestly, if I wanted to launch Trump TV and I just lost
an election, I would be out there on camera every day after the
election. But we’ve barely seen him for a week.

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