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.”)
Every time I see a new piece about how DeSadist is flailing I laugh at all the never-donnies, the “independents” that were flying around in that rarefied air of Enlightened Centrism, and the usual Tone Policing “moderates” who loved to lecture those like me about how DeSadist was going to be the sensible choice and sail to victory because Biden and the Democrats are “too extreme”, but of course the Republicans would not go for donnie again, because not only is he doing those darned tweets and locker room talk, he was also a many-times over loser. Not that these “moderates” were actually against the extremist Republican platform, mind you, they just want someone who is quieter about the extremism.
And they threw in with DeSadist based mostly on his trolling and performative antics aimed at “owning the libs”. Apparently, they never really listened to that voice, or spent any time watching any footage of the guy, or reading anything about just how weird he is.
But they sure wanted to hold forth on how DeSadist was the future of the Republican Party, starting in 2024…I laughed and shook my head then, and do it still.