As the 2024 Republican presidential field began to stir three years ago, Fox News tried to make Ron DeSantis happen. From the week of the 2020 election through February 2021, the network invited DeSantis to appear 113 times, or almost once a day, according to the Tampa Bay Times. In an email uncovered by that newspaper, one Fox producer gushed to a member of DeSantis’s staff, “We see him as the future of the party.”
Maybe, but the future isn’t now. After that early burst of attention, the DeSantis bandwagon never got out of the garage. DeSantis’s national support crested at about 30 percent in early 2023 before slipping to less than half that figure. His presidential campaign will be lucky to survive beyond an expected pounding in tomorrow’s Iowa caucus and further humiliation in the New Hampshire primary. That has much to do with his charisma-free persona and his party’s devotion to Donald Trump, but it also reveals something about Fox’s vaunted power to shape Republican politics—namely, that it’s a myth.
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Whichever candidate Fox News might support at the outset of a primary, it reliably comes to support the eventual Republican nominee. This suggests that it’s less a kingmaker than a courtier, pledging support to those already on the throne. Rather than influencing its viewers, it is influenced by them. There is no clearer example of this dynamic than the financial and journalistic debacle that was the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit. Fox’s parent company paid $787.5 million to settle Dominion’s claims that Fox had smeared the company by alleging that its election hardware had flipped votes from Trump to Joe Biden in 2020. Depositions showed that Fox’s top personalities and executives, including Murdoch, were well aware that Dominion wasn’t at the center of a conspiracy to cheat Trump out of reelection, even as Fox hosts and guests continued to say so on the air.
The now-obvious reason: Fox’s leaders feared that their audience would light out for other, even more strident TV networks if Fox didn’t keep hammering Dominion. This was not irrational. Incensed that Fox had called the election for Biden, Trump encouraged his supporters to abandon the network. “The great @FoxNews daytime ratings CRASH will only get worse!” he tweeted two weeks after Election Day. The previously obscure Newsmax network began to surge, propelled by its unalloyed Trump sycophancy. “We’re here to stay,” crowed the network’s CEO, Christopher Ruddy, to CNN at the time. “The ratings are showing that.” This proved premature. After Fox recommitted to Trump’s Big Lie, its ratings rebounded. The lesson was obvious: Fox holds less sway over its audience than its audience holds over Fox. The viewers demanded that their delusions be catered to. Fox, chasing ratings, complied. (This dynamic recently prompted Ron DeSantis, of all people, to complain, of Fox and Trump, “They don’t hold him accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers.”)
Myth is a strong word. I would argue that it was their monster to begin with, but now it’s out of their control.
Yeah, this is exactly it. The cons/Republican Party and Faux (and hate radio. and Breitbart. and. and. and.) were all colluding together to get the worst people whipped up and angry about bullshit so they’d vote Republican.
The problem is that Frankenstein’s monster is now out of their control. They cultivated and unleashed and normalized the craziest fringes of the Teabagging Birchers all throughout the country, but those people now feel empowered to be their very worst selves, and they are not looking to only Faux and other cons for their cues. If Faux stops giving them that extremist dopamine hit, they’ll go elsewhere for it. If Faux becomes the methadone clinic of the poutrage circuit, the base will seek out the China White somewhere else…