I suppose it’s not surprising to learn that Fox news is totally corrupt but it’s always good to have the receipts:
In the weeks before the 2020 election, as Fox News executives and luminaries came to terms with its possible outcome, some began to see in it a long-awaited opportunity — a chance to break up with Donald Trump.
Even the president sensed a growing distance from the network that was once so closely aligned with him. “What’s the biggest difference between this and four years ago?” he asked rhetorically during an Election Day appearance on “Fox & Friends,” skipping over obvious choices such as U.S. foreign relations, immigration policy or the makeup of the federal courts. “I say Fox,” he answered. “It’s much different now.”
The sentiment was held most fervently on Fox’s news side and in its Washington bureau, according to current and former Fox News personalities familiar with the dynamic who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations. Many felt the network’s identity had become too tightly bound up with its opinion hosts — some of whom had become not just on-air cheerleaders but behind-the-scenes advisers for a president adored by their viewers — at the expense of the organization’s old self-forged image as a “fair and balanced” news operation.
Yet the post-Trump era opened for Fox with a ratings drop that quickly prompted a recalibration of those 2021 visions.
Now, one year later, the dream some harbored of distancing from Trump is long over. The biggest threat Fox now faces is a pair of looming lawsuits from two voting technology companies that claim the network, far from turning away from Trump, allowed Trump-allied personalities — including on-air hosts as well as guests — to falsely malign them with bogus conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud in 2020.
Over the course of the year, Fox managed to reassert itself as the No. 1 ranked cable programmer — and wholeheartedly realigned itself with the former president and his supporters.
It’s a hard-fought triumph that has allowed Fox executives to shrug off two other recent developments that, at least to outsiders, further undermined its credentials as a news broker — the departure of veteran anchor Chris Wallace and the revelation of panicked text messages that three of its hosts sent to Trump’s chief of staff,urging him to get the president to calm the Jan. 6 rioters at the U.S. Capitol.
They do not care. The ratings are up, they have fought off the challenge from Trump friendly rivals OAN and Newsmax and they have reconciled themselves to being nothing more than a propaganda network. It’s all good for them. But it’s an emergency for the rest of us.
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