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- President Donald Trump has gone from a Fox News super fan to waging war against the network, encouraging his supporters to migrate over to more MAGA-friendly channels like Newsmax and One America News Network.
- After years of its primetime opinion hosts indulging Trump, Fox News is under a siege of their own making as they recognize Joe Biden as president-elect and increasingly challenge Trump’s baseless election fraud claims.
- Fox News’ favorability ratings among Republicans fell by 13% following the election, according to the latest Morning Consult survey.
- Still, the network’s ratings are holding strong over competitors, even as upstart rivals grow larger audiences by defending Trump.
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What happens when a news network indulges a superfan who can call into his favorite shows any time, live tweet its programming most mornings and, in some cases, find affirmation for his wildest conspiracy theories?
The answer has been unfolding ever since election week, when President Donald Trump went ballistic after the Fox News Decision Desk called the race for President-elect Joe Biden.
Trump, who referred to himself as the network’s “golden goose,” has since been encouraging his followers to seek alternatives to Fox News, namely Newsmax and One America News Network.
Much has been written about the ensuing tensions at Fox, where daytime news anchors and reporters in the field push back on the president’s outlandish and unsubstantiated theories of voter fraud, only for primetime opinion hosts to not only entertain them, but scold the rest of the news media for not hearing Trump out.
More recently, even Tucker Carlson, one of Trump’s most ardent defenders, became the subject of an intense backlash for simply pointing out one of the president’s attorneys could not produce any evidence to back up her election fraud allegations.
Then Laura Ingraham, another one of Trump's primetime favorites, came out to state the "reality": Joe Biden is going to be the next president.
In a new Morning Consult poll, Fox News' favorability ratings among Republicans fell by 13% following the election.
—Joanna Piacenza (@jpiacenza) November 20, 2020
A shift is underway, and as Insider's Claire Atkinson reported, media executives and financial firms are making a land grab for Fox News viewers.
However, the hype from some circles of social media on an impending collapse at Fox News just doesn't match up with the data.
Fox News is still killing it in the ratings
Fox News has traditionally seen a decent bump in ratings when Democrats retake power, most notably when they shot up as President Barack Obama took office.
They've also had a banner year in 2020.
Tucker Carlson's show became the most viewed in cable news history. The latest Nielsen ratings show Fox News boasting an average of 2.3 million viewers in daytime programming and 4.7 million in primetime.
Despite Newsmax making headlines for Trump voters "flocking" to them, with CEO Christopher Ruddy bragging about hitting 1.1 million viewers in primetime, those numbers would be unacceptable at Fox.
Sometimes, Fox shows double up on MSNBC and CNN's ratings in the same hour.
So even if there is some sort defection afoot that suggests a lost opportunity among Trump's hardcore MAGA set, it has a long way to go before it remotely becomes a problem for Fox News executives.
Newsmax and OAN face two other significant hurdles to competing with Fox.
Firstly, their production values simply do not stack up to what Fox News offers.
Second of all, the likes of Newsmax and OAN have nowhere close to the same level of distribution among cable providers as Fox News does, and even in the packages where they can compete, their channel placement is relegated away from the side-by-side cluster of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC.
Catching up on that front would cost Newsmax and OAN up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
The problem Fox News is facing as Trump wages war against them is more of a philosophical one than a business one.
Still, the network's predicament is of their own making. For Trump to identify himself as Fox News' "golden goose" underscores how he viewed himself as inextricable from the network's success, and particularly on the primetime front, on-air talent did nothing to tamp that down.
If Trump "and cable had achieved the singularity, a meshing of man and machine into a symbiotic consciousness, the perturbation of each amplifying the other," as New York Times TV Critic James Poniewozik writes in his book "Audience of One," then a breakup was bound to be messy.
Even if the ratings hold strong and would-be suitors like Newsmax hit their ceiling with pro-Trump viewers, there will still be room for a reckoning at Fox News regarding how inextricable the 45th president became from the channel.
For now, Fox News is doing just fine.