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Re: Today in Trump
This article is well done:
With the 2012 presidential election, Fox struggled to maintain an increasingly angry — and fickle — audience. Core viewers didn’t want to believe that Obama was cruising to re-election, and Fox’s hosts and guests told them over and over that they did not have to: The polls showing an Obama victory over his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, were “skewed” by mainstream pollsters with a Democratic bias.
Ailes had long seen every election night as a chance to burnish the news division’s “fair and balanced” bona fides. “Don’t go out there looking like your puppy died,” he would say. But in 2012, viewers’ wishes and reality reached an impasse. As Obama clinched the critical state of Ohio, Karl Rove — George W. Bush’s former political adviser, now a Fox contributor — said the call was premature, keeping audience hopes alive; Megyn Kelly, a rising star from the news side, shut him down mercilessly, marching down to the Fox News decision desk, on camera, to have the team explain why in no uncertain terms Rove was wrong.
In the days that followed Obama’s re-election, Fox’s ratings fell, so much at some points that the network was trailing MSNBC in the key 25-to-54 age demographic, a focus of advertisers. As the discussion about whether and how the network had lost the trust of its audience continued, executives in the news division dropped their most strident poll denier, the political analyst Dick Morris, and sidelined Rove. But another network regular, Donald J. Trump, appeared to draw a different lesson from the election miss. The audience wanted to stay in the world Fox presented the first time.
In 2012, you could see the seeds of Trump’s 2016 victory and even the run-up to the Jan. 6 crisis. The longtime television personality knew his audience — soon to be his base — better than any Fox host, and he did not hesitate to feed it: “More reports of voting machines switching Romney votes to Obama,” Trump tweeted before voting had even ended; then afterward, “Let’s fight like hell to stop this great and disgusting injustice,” and “We can’t let this happen, we should march on Washington and stop this travesty” and “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!”
Trump, with his flagrant disregard for facts, presented every news organization with significant challenges. For Fox, the problem was even trickier. Trump had a particularly strong hold on its core audience members. Would Fox follow them down the rabbit hole? By the time he clinched the 2016 Republican nomination, they had choices. For the first time, there were other options for conservative news consumers on television — Newsmax, which Ruddy had brought to cable in 2014, and One America News Network, which made its debut in 2013. The new networks were “barely a blip,” one Fox executive would say dismissively.
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This was the company, and the audience, that were confronted by Trump’s election lie in 2020. The president could create and distribute a story in real time, and Fox could track the viewer response minute by minute. What it found was exactly what Trump intuited after Romney’s loss in 2012: The audience wanted the election lie. When Fox stopped giving it to the audience, there was an instant falloff. That falloff came quickly after Fox News became the first network to call the state of Arizona for Biden in 2020, undermining his contention that he was winning. The president and viewers were furious, and competitors were ready to take them away.
Murdoch had stood by the Arizona call, even as the White House, behind the scenes, called him to question it. A few days later, after Fox News and all of its competitors called the election for Biden, the consequences were becoming clear. “Getting creamed by CNN!” Murdoch wrote to Scott. “Guess our viewers don’t want to watch it. Hard enough for me!” Scott, who had been at the network during the Romney election-night fiasco, had told Murdoch that the “first 72 hours will be the worst of it.” But CNN was not the only competition now. Newsmax was coming in hard and fast. “Fox is having something of an identity crisis, and I don’t know if they know the country as well as we do here,” boasted its star anchor, Greg Kelly, a former Fox News correspondent. Kelly “had over 1 million total viewers on Newsmax,” the president of the Fox Business network, Lauren Petterson, wrote to a colleague. “I see it,” the colleague responded. “Jesus.”
The network’s biggest stars saw it too. “We certainly have gone against the customer is always right,” a Fox colleague wrote to Tucker Carlson. “But hopefully our product is strong enough to withstand.” Carlson later replied, “With Trump behind it, an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.” The route back was clear. As a producer later wrote to associates: “Don’t know how closely you’ve looked at our charts this week, but audience much more interested in voter irregularities than covid hypocrisy or race/Obama book tour.”
In fact, the first Fox News host to detail the supposed Dominion plot, Maria Bartiromo, was grabbing big ratings as she treated its intricacies seriously. (“Sidney, I want to ask you about these algorithms and the Dominion software,” she said to Sidney Powell.) Another host, Lou Dobbs of Fox Business, was doing the same as other Dominion allegations spread across other shows.
‘I want to ask you about these algorithms and the Dominion software — I understand Nancy Pelosi has an interest in this company.’ Maria Bartiromo
Emails and texts turned over during discovery show that Scott and Wallace, and so many others at the network, had been informed it was all false. Dominion representatives and then lawyers were pelting the network with fact-checks and finally legal warnings. “Lies,” a Dominion representative, Tony Fratto, wrote to Wallace at one point. Yet the network seemed trapped by the viewer expectations it helped set; attempts to address the preposterousness of the whole conspiracy theory would draw blowback and new attacks from rivals. In late November, Tucker Carlson gave it a shot, telling his audience that Powell was failing to provide any evidence for her conspiracy theory. Even then, he qualified it: “It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” he said. “It might have happened.” And he still took a hammering online.
If they didn’t want it from Carlson — who was at the same time seeding other false notions about voter fraud — they certainly didn’t want it from the news correspondents, who were not. It was then that Fox’s journalists began hearing about “respect” for the audience. What the journalists didn’t understand was that in all the news-side election calling and debunking, “the audience feels like we crapped on them,” Scott explained to her deputy. They were going to have to rebuild trust.
An executive at Fox News, who would speak about the court proceedings only on the condition of anonymity, said that showing “respect” did not mean relinquishing the job of debunking the false reports. In the executive’s view, those who were drawing Scott’s ire were being unduly “snarky” in doing so and appeared to be “talking down to” viewers and “even rolling their eyes.”
But for all the executives’ venting about a lack of “respect” among Fox journalists, what is not apparent in the emails is any dressing down of those on the staff who were spreading the falsehoods. There is certainly no obvious concern about what the anger that was stemming from the belief in those falsehoods might lead to. As a producer texted to Bartiromo in late November: “To be honest, our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition. They still have hope.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/m...ion-jan-6.html
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Originally Posted by Spicoli
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