Move over, Sean, Donald wants your hour!
With less than a week until the first votes are cast in the 2024 Republican primary, front-runner Donald Trump blew up Fox News’ prime time schedule on Wednesday. The former president and de facto programming executive booted his longtime ally Sean Hannity out of his 9 p.m. time slot and held a town hall with Iowa voters to compete with CNN’s debate between Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.
Fox executives were thrilled with the outcome. But the 9 p.m. time slot “was not our choice,” Fox News anchor Bret Baier told Axios beforehand. “This was a stipulation from the Trump folks to do it at that hour.” Or as he put it to the Deseret News, “It was the Trump campaign’s demand.”
Baier had been wooing Tump for quite a while, and Trump suddenly agreed to participate after the CNN debate details were locked. “They would only do it if it was at that time,” he said. “We offered a number of different times. That was their stipulation.”
It should go without saying that Trump, a creature of TV ratings, wanted to out-rate the CNN debate. And on Thursday the overnight Nielsen report card showed he succeeded: Fox and Trump averaged 4.3 million TV viewers, while CNN’s telecast with DeSantis and Haley averaged 2.5 million at the same hour.
Before the numbers landed, though, I heard from a rival TV news executive who was flabbergasted by Baier’s admission that the Trump town hall timing was “not our choice.”
“It’s their air!” the executive exclaimed. “Who is in control?”
The answer is self-evident. Fox is falling in line just like most of the rest of the GOP.
“Fox critics love to say Trump is the monster we created, okay, but we say it to ourselves too. We know it’s true,” a Fox correspondent said to me Thursday, sounding fatigued.
So how does Frankenstein make peace with its monster? Slowly and inevitably.
The history between Trump and Fox is so fraught, and the relationship is so convoluted, that writers typically spend several paragraphs explaining the complexities. But it is also, at a gut level, quite simple. The Fox brand and the Trump brand are both about defeating Democrats and exploiting the levers of power.
Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch, I’ve been told, keeps quiet when the topic of Trump comes up. Lachlan isn’t seeking a favor-trading, phone-calling relationship like his father, Rupert, once had with Trump; nor is he telling people that he is repulsed by Trump, the way Rupert freely does nowadays. “It’s just business” is his attitude, according to a confidant.
Fox’s rah-rah pro-Trump commentary certainly benefits the bottom line, and it mirrors Lachlan’s openness to Trump, in stark contrast to Rupert’s contempt. In emails that were obtained by Dominion through litigation, but escaped attention when Fox paid Dominion $787.5 million last year, Lachlan was shown to be cheering for Trump on election night 2020, using exclamation points whenever Trump pulled ahead in swing states. In a 2024 rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden, the conservative Fox Corp CEO will undoubtedly vote for Trump.