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Fox News and the New York Post, two of the main US conservative media controlled by the tycoon Rupert murdoch, in the last hours they took distance from Donald trump for the first time since his triumph in 2016, in which he can anticipate a change of course.
“Fox News sucks!” Some supporters of the US president shouted in Phoenix, Arizona on Thursday night, furious at the television network that has been considered an unwavering ally of Trump for five years.
The early announcement of the victory of the Democratic presidential Joe biden in Arizona since Tuesday night was what split the waters. Trump’s team called on the network to retract, to no avail, while other media refrained from declaring a winner pending the end of the vote count in this decisive hinge state.
Since then Fox News treated allegations of voter fraud with great prudence mass of the Trump camp and the president himself, without proof.
“We just haven’t seen it,” Bret Baier, the network’s top-rated political journalist, told the air on Friday. “They didn’t show us anything.”
Many wonder if Fox News is abandoning Trump after contributing to their surprise victory in 2016.
Jeffrey McCall, a communication professor at DePauw University, recalls that Fox News was always a two-sided chain.
On the one hand, star presenters, more editorialists than journalists, ultra-conservatives, and on the other, a clearly more measured writing.
Many Fox journalists, such as the moderator of the first presidential debate Chris Wallace, are recognized for their professionalism.
On the side of the editorialists, the star of the chain, Sean Hannity, very close to Trump, estimated on Thursday that “the Americans are right to be suspicious (…), not to believe in the legitimacy of the results.”
For McCall, Trump’s treatment in recent days and the anticipated announcement of Biden’s victory in Arizona signal “Fox News’s efforts to function as independently as possible from the editorialists.”
But according to Reece Peck, author of “Fox Populism”, a book about Fox News, this distance “could lead her to lose audience and incite her to go to another network, like OAN”, the new small news network that openly supports Trump.
Behind this network, whose audience broke records for a cable network, with 14.1 million viewers on election night, is tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
Known for his conservative views, he would have been used to the idea of a Biden win for several months, according to the Daily Beast website.
However, “I don’t see the Murdoch family calling the newsroom to explain to Bret Baier how this or that story should be covered,” McCall clarifies.
The political winds
The other creature of the Australian octogenarian billionaire in the United States, the New York Post tabloid newspaper, could be “A more reliable reflection of Murdoch’s views”, estimated Peck.
For him, the mogul “exercises much more control” over the Post than over Fox News.
As the vote count dragged on and delayed the announcement of a winner of the presidential election, the New York Post did not take up any of the Trump side’s theories about alleged electoral manipulations.
However, a few days ago he was maneuvering with complaints made by Trump’s relatives against Biden’s son, Hunter.
On Friday, two opinion columns acknowledged that Trump would be possibly defeated, a scenario the president refuses to admit.
“Sometimes you can feel how Murdoch understands where the political winds are going,” said Reece Peck, a professor at the City University of New York (CUNY).
Biden is one of those moderate Democrats I could tolerate. “Biden doesn’t scare the American business media too much,” Peck explained.
While Fox News journalists appear to have taken over for now, star editorialists like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson remain the key to the network’s audience and billing, McCall recalled.
With Trump or without him, Fox News will continue to be a counterweight to the media close to the Democrats, said. And it may still be the automatic fate of millions of conservative viewers.
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