Trump is losing Fox

      "I think Rupert Murdoch--more than anyone else--holds the fate of this country in his hand. An Australian."

           Bill Mahar, HBO, Real Time, November 20, 2020

Fox News was an information silo of alternative facts. It was a comfortable place for its viewers, nearly watertight in sharing Trump's message. Then it got leaky. 

The trickle is turning into a flood. They are abandoning Trump.

I watch enough Fox News to see some of what Fox News viewers see. Readers who avoid Fox are missing a key element of Trump's appeal. He has a media organ with a vast audience that echoes and cherishes him. Fox "gets" its audience. Trump "gets" them, too. They were a team. 

Fox morning and evening opinion hosts are in nonstop outrage at the contempt they feel is hurled themselves, the patriotic, religious, All-American, police-and-troops-supporting viewers. Trump shares and amplifies the resentment people feel when they are picked on by snobs and interlopers. The snobs are people with political or cultural power: Democratic politicians, educated "experts," "mainstream media," Hollywood actors with liberal opinions, technology companies that label tweets, PC academics and their "cancel culture." The snobs don't care about their jobs. The interlopers are the subaltern: Immigrants, people of color, Muslims, criminals, troublemaking protesters. They are the grabby, ungrateful people who sponge off the taxes paid by good people, who take their jobs, who disrespect their flag and their God.

Sandwiched in the middle of the day, and intermittently in the early evening, were bits of straight news. The weather and sports were reported as straight news. Celebrity stories feature country music conservatives doing wholesome things like eating barbecue and speaking up for patriotic, Christian America.

The problem came from reporting political news. Shepard Smith played it straight. He fact-checked Trump. He left. The audience was leaving him and the situation was too uncomfortable. Chris Wallace picked up where Smith left off, becoming the face of straight news. On his Sunday show this weekend he repeatedly referred to Biden as "President Elect Biden." He did not sneer or sound sarcastic as he said it. Election night reporting described "apparent Biden leads" and "Biden victories." This morning, on the news cutaways from Fox & Friends, the news was straight, describing Biden's vote audit in Georgia, his transition planning, and lawyer Sidney Powell's being kicked off the Trump legal team for having said things Chris Christie called "outrageous," her claim that the election was tainted by a worldwide communist conspiracy. They are sharing a reality that is not vastly different from the reality of CNN or the New York Times.

The Fox evening hosts are behind the curve, still presenting the view the audience welcomes, that Trump has a big chance of victory, that he is a victim of a massive fraud, that he won, of course he won because decent people love him.

As Mahar observed, "It looks like Murdoch is . . . throwing his lot in with reality for a change.” The reality that is leaking into the Fox world is that Trump lost his election. The new reality is that some of what Trump and his agents are saying about the election is too fanciful to believe.  Fox is becoming Trump apostate, more frequently describing Trump neutrally rather than as a cheerleader. 

The broadcast tone of Fox News has always been different from the internet version of Fox. In broadcast, a host can sneer when saying "Chuck Schumer" or "Joe Biden." The notion of sleepy and incompetent can be voiced into the pronunciation of Biden's name. In print, that inflection is gone. So the screen print below exaggerates slightly the point of today's post. This is the landing site for the Fox News website Sunday evening: 

All five stories contradict the notion of Trump victory. 

Shortly after screen-printing this the page was updated to deal with the Trump campaign's jettisoning of Sidney Powell, whose comments expressing the Trump position, some made while standing next to Rudy Giuliani, have become an embarrassment. Powell had said she was going to "blow up" Georgia. She attacked the Republican Secretary of State and Governor of Georgia saying "they're in on the Dominion scam." She said the Dominion software "can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden." She said Trump "won in a landslide."

Trump's campaign said she was on her own, not actually on the Trump legal team. The Fox story fact checked and contradicted Trump, quoting directly from Trump's own tweets which included Powell as one of the people representing Trump. 

Until recently Fox would simply have quoted the new Trump version of reality, that Powell was on her own, don't blame Trump. Now they looked back and pointed out the contradiction. There was a reality based on documentation, not on what Trump just asserted.

Does any of this matter? I think it does. Fox has been the primary validator of Trump's view of reality. 

It is as simple as this: They are choosing Chris Wallace's understanding of the world rather than Trump's. There are facts independent of what Trump says.

This change may open minds. It will allow space for different GOP leaders to define reality and some will disagree with Trump. That may link "reality" back to facts that can be shared and agreed to across the political spectrum. 

It likely will not make politics any easier for Biden, though.  Fox needs to scramble to ward off competition to its right from Newsmax and One America Network, and if they don't do it by cheerleading Trump, they need to prove their bone fides by being more critical than ever of Biden. That is easy and safe for them. The organizing principle and energy of the GOP is resentment and opposition. Trump's election defeat won't change that.

The story line is already in place: everything Biden will attempt to do will be bad, very bad.