Donald Trump’s Fight With Fox News and Megyn Kelly, Explained
An excellent article by Ezra Klein about Fox News’ relationship with Donald Trump, and why it fell apart Thursday night.
Fox News is a strange beast. It is a conservative advocacy organization run by a longtime Republican operative. It is a profit-hungry cable network run by a talented media executive. And it is a news operation that employs some talented journalists who want to be taken seriously by their peers.
These missions conflict with each other. Fox News wants the Republican Party to win elections, but it also wants American politics to be a ridiculous circus that fires up conservative voters. It employs hacks like Steve Doocy and Sean Hannity but also hosts people like Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly, Shepard Smith, and Chris Wallace who, while they might be conservative, pride themselves on actually being journalists.
=====
As heterodox conservative commentator David Frum said, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”
This is the dilemma that Trump now faces. He originally thought Fox worked for him. He was on all the time, he was helping them get higher ratings, and they seemed to love him. But then a few things happened.
First, Fox’s promotion of Trump worked too well. He went from making the Republican primary more interesting to follow — and thus better for ratings — to dominating the Republican primary and potentially harming the ideological movement that Fox supports. Murdoch’s public opposition to Trump was a signal that the network wasn’t likely to tolerate Trump actually becoming the Republican nominee.
Second, Trump had spent much of his time in the hackier corners of the network — outposts of conservative inanity like Fox and Friends. But the debate was led by Fox’s more serious personalities. Baier, Kelly, and Wallace want to be known as some of the toughest questioners in news business — and Trump was a chance to prove their journalistic bona fides to the world. So where other Fox personalities wanted to treat Trump well in the hopes he would come back on their shows, Baier, Kelly, and Wallace wanted to embarrass him.
Finally, Fox News’s incentives had switched. Early in the campaign, the way to get bigger ratings was to build Trump up. But now the whole country was tuning in, and what most people wanted to see was Trump torn down — or at least the fight that would result if Fox News tried to tear Trump down. And that’s what they got. It was extraordinary television, and it led Fox to the highest ratings for any cable news program ever broadcast. Fox figured out how to profit off Trump coming and going, and, better yet, the network got to decide when Trump was coming and when Trump was going.
More: Donald Trump’s Fight With Fox News and Megyn Kelly, Explained - Vox