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On Thursday night in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump supporters bluntly yelled “Fox News sucks” in reference to the news team considered fiercely loyal to the president for the past five years.
Fox News infuriated Trump and his people on election night by calling Arizona for Democrat Joe Biden.
Jared Kushner, Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, called Murdoch in vain to try to get him to recant. Other outlets held back from calling the state of the battlefield for Biden as the vote counting continued.
Since that night, Fox News has very carefully avoided accusations of massive voter fraud emanating from the Trump campaign and the man himself.
“We just haven’t seen it. We haven’t been introduced to it,” Fox News host Brett Baier said on the air Friday.
So people ask if Fox News, which helped bring Trump to power in 2016, is in the process of shedding him as Biden approaches the magic number of 270 electoral votes that would allow him to win the White House.
DePauw University communications professor Jeffrey McCall said Fox News has always had a twin identity: on the one hand, star anchors who are more editorialists than journalists, and on the other, a much more measured newsroom.
Some Fox journalists, like Chris Wallace, who moderated the first Trump-Biden debate, are highly respected professionals.
On the editorial side of the front face is Fox star Sean Hannity, who is very close to Trump and said Thursday night: “Americans have every right to be suspicious … to distrust the legitimacy of results”.
McCall said the way Fox News has treated Trump since the election and his early call to Arizona by Biden shows that the more serious side of the network is trying to “operate as independently as possible from the opinion section and even from the property”.
“These people have their own journalistic standards that they want to uphold.”
But Reece Peck, who wrote a book on Fox News called “Fox Populism,” said this distancing could alienate some viewers and lead them to switch to another news source, such as OAN, a new, ultra-conservative and extremely pro-Trump small group. . .
Behind Fox News, which garnered 14.1 million viewers on election night, is, of course, Murdoch.
The 89-year-old media mogul is known for his conservative views, but in recent months he has grappled with the idea of a Biden victory, according to the Daily Beast.
Still, McCall said, “I guess the Murdoch family isn’t calling the newsroom to tell Bret Baier how to cover certain types of stories.”
Murdoch’s other favorite US outlet, the New York Post, may be “a closer reflection of Murdoch’s political views than even Fox News,” Peck said.
He said Murdoch wields much more control over this tabloid than he did over Fox News.
As the vote count progresses and the world waits to hear the name of the winner, the Post has not accepted any of Trump’s statements about election fraud and theft.
Just a few days ago, just before the election, he did not hesitate to publish a story saying that Biden’s son Hunter, sitting on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, sold access to his father, who was then a low vice president. Barack Obama.
On Friday, the Post ran two op-ed pieces that assumed Trump would likely lose the election.
“Murdoch can sometimes feel like he understands where the political winds are going,” said Peck, who teaches at the City University of New York (CUNY).
And Biden is a centrist Democrat who could stand.
“Biden is not very threatening to the American business community,” Peck said.
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