{"id":128961,"date":"2019-03-11T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T12:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=128961"},"modified":"2019-03-18T07:25:21","modified_gmt":"2019-03-18T07:25:21","slug":"trump-tv-the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/03\/trump-tv-the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump TV: The Making of the Fox News White House"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sean Hannity recently joined Trump at a rally. Greta Van Susteren, a former Fox host, calls the move an \u201cegregious mistake.”
Illustration by Tyler Comrie; photograph from Getty<\/p><\/div>\n

Fox News Has Always Been Partisan. But Has It Become Propaganda?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

11 Mar 2019 – <\/em>In January, during the longest government shutdown<\/a> in America\u2019s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message.<\/p>\n

But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that Sean Hannity<\/a>, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn\u2019t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling with Administration officials, at one point hugging Kirstjen Nielsen<\/a>, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The pool report noted that Hannity was seen \u201chuddling\u201d with the White House communications director, Bill Shine. After the photo op, Hannity had an exclusive on-air interview with Trump. Politico later reported<\/a> that it was Hannity\u2019s seventh interview with the President, and Fox\u2019s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as \u201cfake news.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hannity was treated in Texas like a member of the Administration because he virtually is one. The same can be said of Fox\u2019s chairman, Rupert Murdoch<\/a>. Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn\u2019t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia\u2019s Miller Center and the author of \u201cMessengers of the Right,\u201d a history of the conservative media\u2019s impact on American politics, says of Fox, \u201cIt\u2019s the closest we\u2019ve come to having state TV.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hemmer argues that Fox\u2014which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox\u2014acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. \u201cFox is not just taking the temperature of the base\u2014it\u2019s raising the temperature,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a radicalization model.\u201d For both Trump and Fox, \u201cfear is a business strategy\u2014it keeps people watching.\u201d As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword. The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other\u2019s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders<\/a>, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as \u201cFox & Friends<\/a>\u201d and \u201cHannity.\u201d Trump, Hemmer says, has \u201calmost become a programmer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fox\u2019s defenders view such criticism as unfounded and politically biased. Ken LaCorte, who was in senior management at Fox News for nearly twenty years, until 2016, and recently started his own news service, told me, \u201cThe people at Fox said the same thing about the press and Obama.\u201d Fox\u2019s public-relations department offers numerous examples of its reporters and talk-show hosts challenging the Administration. Chris Wallace, a tough-minded and ecumenical interviewer, recently grilled Stephen Miller<\/a>, a senior Trump adviser, on the need for a border wall, given that virtually all drugs seized at the border are discovered at checkpoints. Trump is not the first President to have a favorite media organization; James Madison and Andrew Jackson were each boosted by partisan newspapers. But many people who have watched and worked with Fox over the years, including some leading conservatives, regard Fox\u2019s deepening Trump orthodoxy with alarm. Bill Kristol<\/a>, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, \u201cIt\u2019s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn\u2019t crazy. Now it\u2019s just propaganda.\u201d Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything like it before,\u201d he says of Fox. \u201cIt\u2019s as if the President had his own press organization. It\u2019s not healthy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nothing has formalized the partnership between Fox and Trump more than the appointment, in July, 2018, of Bill Shine, the former co-president of Fox News, as director of communications and deputy chief of staff at the White House. Kristol says of Shine, \u201cWhen I first met him, he was producing Hannity\u2019s show at Fox, and the two were incredibly close.\u201d Both come from white working-class families on Long Island, and they are godfathers to each other\u2019s children, who refer to them as \u201cUncle Bill\u201d and \u201cUncle Sean.\u201d Another former colleague says, \u201cThey spend their vacations together.\u201d A third recalls, \u201cI was rarely in Shine\u2019s office when Sean didn\u2019t call. And I was in Shine\u2019s office a lot. They talked all the time\u2014many times a day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shine led Fox News\u2019 programming division for a dozen years, overseeing the morning and evening opinion shows, which collectively get the biggest ratings and define the network\u2019s conservative brand. Straight news was not within his purview. In July, 2016, Roger Ailes<\/a>, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Fox, was fired in the face of numerous allegations of chronic sexual harassment, and Shine became co-president. But within a year he, too, had been forced out, amid a second wave of sexual-harassment allegations, some of them against Fox\u2019s biggest star at the time, Bill O\u2019Reilly. Shine wasn\u2019t personally accused of sexual harassment, but several lawsuits named him as complicit in a workplace culture of coverups, payoffs, and victim intimidation.<\/p>\n

Shine, who has denied any wrongdoing, has kept a low profile at the White House, and rejects interview requests, including one from this magazine. But Kristol contends that Shine\u2019s White House appointment is a scandal. \u201cIt\u2019s been wildly under-covered,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s astounding that Shine\u2014the guy who covered up Ailes\u2019s horrible behavior\u2014is the deputy chief of staff!\u201d<\/p>\n

Video from The New Yorker:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Visual Drama of the State of the Union<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/em> columnist Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn\u2019t do so now. \u201cFox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it\u2019s morphed into something that is not even news,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.\u201d The feedback loop is so strong, she notes, that Trump \u201cwill even pick up an error made by Fox,\u201d as when he promoted on Twitter a bogus Fox story claiming that South Africa was \u201cseizing land from white farmers.\u201d Rubin told me, \u201cIt\u2019s funny that Bill Shine went over to the White House. He could have stayed in his old job. The only difference is payroll.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Shine, the Fox and White House payrolls actually do overlap. The Hollywood Reporter<\/em> obtained financial-disclosure forms<\/a> revealing that Fox has been paying Shine millions of dollars since he joined the Administration. Last year, he collected the first half of a seven-million-dollar bonus that he was owed after resigning from Fox; this year, he will collect the remainder. That sum is in addition to an $8.4-million severance payment that he received upon leaving the network. In December, four Democratic senators sent a letter to the White House counsel\u2019s office, demanding proof that Fox\u2019s payments to Shine don\u2019t violate federal ethics and conflict-of-interest statutes.<\/p>\n

Shine is only the most recent Fox News alumnus to join the Trump Administration. Among others, Trump appointed the former Fox contributor Ben Carson<\/a> to be his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the former Fox commentator John Bolton<\/a> to be his national-security adviser, and the former Fox commentator K.\u00a0T. McFarland to be his deputy national-security adviser. (McFarland resigned after four months.) Trump recently picked<\/a> the former Fox News anchor Heather Nauert to be the Ambassador to the United Nations, but she soon withdrew herself from consideration, reportedly because her nanny, an immigrant, lacked a work permit. The White House door swings both ways: Hope Hicks, Shine\u2019s predecessor in the communications job, is now the top public-relations officer at 21st Century Fox. Several others who have left the Trump White House, including Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser on national security, regularly appear on Fox. Gorka recently insisted, on Fox Business, that one of Trump\u2019s biggest setbacks\u2014retreating from the shutdown without securing border-wall funds\u2014was actually a \u201cmasterstroke.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other former Fox News celebrities have practically become part of the Trump family. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former co-host of \u201cThe Five,\u201d left Fox in July; she is now working on Trump\u2019s re\u00eblection campaign and dating Donald Trump, Jr. (Guilfoyle left the network mid-contract, after a former Fox employee threatened to sue the network for harassment and accused Guilfoyle of sharing lewd images, among other misconduct; Fox and the former employee reached a multimillion-dollar settlement. A lawyer who represents Guilfoyle said that \u201cany suggestion\u201d that she \u201cengaged in misconduct at Fox is patently false.\u201d) Pete Hegseth and Lou Dobbs, hosts on Fox Business, have each been patched into Oval Office meetings, by speakerphone, to offer policy advice. Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 P.M.<\/em> According to the Washington Post<\/a><\/em>, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a \u201cWest Wing adviser,\u201d attributing this development, in part, to the \u201cutter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.\u201d The expert added, \u201cThe place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.\u201d As a result, he said, Fox\u2019s on-air personalities \u201care filling the vacuum.\u201d<\/p>\n

Axios recently reported<\/a> that sixty per cent of Trump\u2019s day is spent in unstructured \u201cexecutive time,\u201d much of it filled by television. Charlie Black, a longtime Republican lobbyist in Washington, whose former firm, Black, Manafort & Stone, advised Trump in the eighties and nineties, told me, \u201cTrump gets up and watches \u2018Fox & Friends\u2019 and thinks these are his friends. He thinks anything on Fox is friendly. But the problem is he gets unvetted ideas.\u201d Trump has told confidants that he has ranked the loyalty of many reporters, on a scale of 1 to 10. Bret Baier, Fox News\u2019 chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of \u201cFox & Friends,\u201d is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.<\/p>\n

It is hardly unprecedented for American media barons to go beyond their pages to try to influence the course of politics. At the 1960 Democratic National Convention, Philip Graham, the co-owner of the Washington Post<\/em>, helped broker a deal in which John\u00a0F. Kennedy selected Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. But now a direct pipeline has been established between the Oval Office and the office of Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born billionaire who founded News Corp and 21st Century Fox. Multiple sources told me that Murdoch and Trump often talk on the phone. A former aide to Trump, who has been in the Oval Office when Murdoch has called, says, \u201cIt\u2019s two men who\u2019ve known each other for a very long time having frank conversations. The President certainly doesn\u2019t kowtow to Murdoch, but Murdoch also doesn\u2019t to him. He speaks to him the same way he would have five years ago.\u201d According to Michael Wolff\u2019s 2018 book, \u201cFire and Fury<\/a>,\u201d Murdoch derided Trump as \u201ca fucking idiot\u201d after a conversation about immigration. The aide says Trump knows that Murdoch has denigrated him behind his back, but \u201cit doesn\u2019t seem to matter\u201d that much. Several sources confirmed to me that Murdoch regales friends with Trump\u2019s latest inanities. But Murdoch, arguably the most powerful media mogul in the world, is an invaluable ally to any politician. Having Murdoch\u2019s\u2014and Fox\u2019s\u2014support is essential for Trump, the aide says: \u201cIt\u2019s very important for the base.\u201d<\/p>\n

Murdoch may be even closer to Trump\u2019s son-in-law, Jared Kushner<\/a>. Well-informed sources say that Kushner, an increasingly valued White House adviser, has worked hard to win over Murdoch, showing him respect and asking him for advice. Kushner has regularly assured Murdoch that the White House is a smooth-running operation, despite many reports suggesting that it is chaotic. Kushner now has an almost filial status with Murdoch, who turns eighty-eight this month, and numerous sources told me that they communicate frequently. \u201cLike, every day,\u201d one said.<\/p>\n

Murdoch has cultivated heads of state in Australia and Great Britain, and someone close to him says that \u201che\u2019s always wanted to have a relationship with a President\u2014he\u2019s a businessman and he sees benefits of having a chief of state doing your bidding.\u201d Murdoch has met every American President since Kennedy, but, the close associate says, \u201cuntil now a relationship has eluded him.\u201d Still, Murdoch\u2019s coziness with Trump may come at a cost. Roger Ailes, during his final days at Fox, apparently warned Murdoch of the perils. According to Gabriel Sherman, a biographer of Ailes who has written about Fox for New York<\/em> and Vanity Fair<\/em>, Ailes told Murdoch, \u201cTrump gets great ratings, but if you\u2019re not careful he\u2019s going to end up totally controlling Fox News.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump became famous, in no small part, because of Rupert Murdoch. After Murdoch bought the New York Post<\/em>, in 1976, he was introduced to Trump through a mutual acquaintance, Roy Cohn, the infamous legal fixer, who, as a young man, was Senator Joseph McCarthy\u2019s chief counsel. Cohn saw the potential for tabloid synergy: Trump could attain celebrity in the pages of the Post<\/em> as a playboy mogul, and Murdoch could sell papers by chronicling Trump\u2019s exploits.<\/p>\n

In private, Murdoch regarded Trump with disdain, seeing him as a real-estate huckster and a shady casino operator. But, for all their differences, the two men had key traits in common. They both inherited and expanded family enterprises\u2014an Australian newspaper; an outer-borough New York City real-estate firm\u2014but felt looked down upon by people who were richer and closer to the centers of power. As Edward Luce, of the Financial Times<\/em>, has noted<\/a>, both men have tapped into anti-\u00e9litist resentment to connect with the public and to increase their fortunes. Trump and Murdoch also share a transactional approach to politics, devoid of almost any ideology besides self-interest.<\/p>\n

Murdoch could not have foreseen that Trump would become President, but he was a visionary about the niche audience that became Trump\u2019s base. In 1994, Murdoch laid out an audacious plan to Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton. Murdoch, who had been a U.S. citizen for less than a decade, invited Hundt to his Benedict Canyon estate for dinner. After the meal, Murdoch led him outside to take in the glittering view of the Los Angeles Basin, and confided that he planned to launch a radical new television network. Unlike the three established networks, which vied for the same centrist viewers, his creation would follow the unapologetically lowbrow model of the tabloids that he published in Australia and England, and appeal to a narrow audience that would be entirely his. His core viewers, he said, would be football fans; with this aim in mind, he had just bought the rights to broadcast N.F.L. games. Hundt told me, \u201cWhat he was really saying was that he was going after a working-class audience. He was going to carve out a base\u2014what would become the Trump base.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hundt recalled the conversation as \u201coverwhelming.\u201d He said, \u201cI was at this house more expensive than any I could ever imagine. This person\u2019s made a huge mark in two other countries, and he had entered our country and was saying, \u2018I\u2019m going to break up the three-party oligopoly that has governed the most important medium of communication for politics and policy in this country since the Second World War.\u2019 It was like a scene from \u2018Faust<\/a>.\u2019 What came to mind was Mephistopheles.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blair Levin, at that time the chief of staff at the F.C.C. and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, says, \u201cFox\u2019s great insight wasn\u2019t necessarily that there was a great desire for a conservative point of view.\u201d More erudite conservatives, he says, such as William\u00a0F. Buckley, Jr., and Bill Kristol, couldn\u2019t have succeeded as Fox has. Levin observes, \u201cThe genius was seeing that there\u2019s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1996, Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to create a conservative TV news outlet. Ailes, who died in 2017, was a master of attack politics and wedge issues, having been a media consultant on several of America\u2019s dirtiest and most divisive campaigns, including those of Richard Nixon. Ailes invented programming, Levin argues, \u201cthat confirmed all your worst instincts\u2014Fox News\u2019 fundamental business model is driving fear.\u201d The formula worked spectacularly well. By 2002, Fox had displaced CNN as the highest-rated cable news network, and it has remained on top ever since.<\/p>\n

In 2011, at Ailes\u2019s invitation, Trump began making weekly guest appearances on the morning show \u201cFox & Friends.\u201d In a trial run of his campaign tactics, he used the channel as a platform to exploit racist suspicions about President Barack Obama<\/a>, spreading doubt about whether he was born in America. (In one segment, Trump suggested that Obama\u2019s \u201cfamily doesn\u2019t even know what hospital he was born in!\u201d) As Hundt sees it, \u201cMurdoch didn\u2019t invent Trump, but he invented the audience. Murdoch was going to make a Trump exist. Then Trump comes along, sees all these people, and says, \u2018I\u2019ll be the ringmaster in your circus!\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s arrival marked an important shift in tone at Fox. Until then, the network had largely mocked birtherism as a conspiracy theory. O\u2019Reilly called its promoters \u201cunhinged,\u201d and Glenn Beck, who at the time also hosted a Fox show, called them \u201cidiots.\u201d But Trump gave birtherism national exposure, and, in a sign of things to come, Hannity fanned the flames. Hannity began saying that, although he thought<\/em> that Obama had been born in the United States, the circumstances surrounding his birth certificate were \u201codd.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fox\u2019s hostility toward the Obama Administration grew increasingly extreme. Its coverage of the Benghazi debacle<\/a>\u2014a tragic embassy ambush not unlike others that had claimed American lives in previous Administrations\u2014devolved into a relentless attack on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton<\/a>. In certain instances, however, Fox executives enforced journalistic limits. The network cancelled Beck\u2019s show, in 2011, because his paranoid rants had become too embarrassing. (Among other things, Beck accused the White House science adviser of having proposed stemming population growth through forced abortions and \u201csterilants\u201d in the water.) At the height of the Tea Party rebellion, Ailes reprimanded Hannity for violating the line between journalism and politics. Hannity had arranged to tape his evening Fox show at a Tea Party fund-raiser in Ohio. When Ailes learned of the plan, only hours before the event, he demanded that Hannity cancel his appearance. According to a former Fox executive, Ailes then blew up at Bill Shine, who had authorized Hannity\u2019s trip. \u201cRoger was livid, and ripped the shit out of Shine,\u201d the former executive says, recalling that Ailes yelled, \u201cNo one at Fox is shilling for the Tea Party!\u201d Afterward, Shine released a statement criticizing Hannity\u2019s actions. And Murdoch, at a panel about the news, expressed a similar view, saying, \u201cI don\u2019t think we should be supporting the Tea Party or any other party.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such niceties no longer apply. In November, Hannity joined Trump onstage at a climactic rally for the midterm elections. Afterward, Fox issued a limp statement saying that it didn\u2019t \u201ccondone any talent participating in campaign events\u201d and that the \u201cunfortunate distraction\u201d had \u201cbeen addressed.\u201d Many Fox News reporters were angry, and provided critical anonymous quotes to the media, but Hannity didn\u2019t apologize, saying that he had been \u201csurprised yet honored\u201d when Trump called him up onstage. This response was dubious: before the rally, Trump\u2019s campaign had advertised Hannity as a \u201cspecial guest.\u201d When Hannity joined Trump, he not only praised him for \u201cpromises kept\u201d; he also echoed the President\u2019s attacks on the press, castigating the rest of the media covering the rally as \u201cfake news.\u201d The evening ended with a high five between Hannity and Shine, who had recently started working at the White House.<\/p>\n

For Greta Van Susteren, a host on Fox between 2002 and 2016, Hannity\u2019s rally appearance illustrates the difference at Fox since Ailes\u2019s departure. For all of Ailes\u2019s faults, Van Susteren argues, he exerted a modicum of restraint. She believes that he would have insisted on at least some distance from President Trump, if only to preserve the appearance of journalistic respectability embodied in the motto Ailes devised for Fox: \u201cFair and Balanced.\u201d (That motto was retired in 2017.) Van Susteren says, \u201c\u00a0\u2018Hannity\u2019 is an opinion show, but when he went onstage with Trump he became part of the campaign. That was an egregious mistake. It was way over the line.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Ailes paid occasional lip service to journalistic integrity, Fox News was hardly fair and balanced under his leadership. Gabriel Sherman, in his biography, \u201cThe Loudest Voice in the Room<\/a>,\u201d reports that Ailes was so obsessed with bringing down Obama in 2012 that he declared to colleagues, \u201cI want<\/em> to elect the next President.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, during the 2016 campaign, Fox executives were initially uneasy about Trump\u2019s candidacy. Murdoch tweeted that Trump was \u201cembarrassing his friends\u201d and \u201cthe whole country.\u201d An editorial<\/a> in the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Murdoch\u2019s flagship newspaper, called Trump\u2019s candidacy a \u201ccatastrophe.\u201d Murdoch, an immigrant himself, bridled at Trump\u2019s xenophobia. In 2015, when Trump claimed that most immigrants coming from Mexico were criminals and rapists, Murdoch corrected him on Twitter, noting that \u201cMexican immigrants, as with all immigrants, have much lower crime rates than native born.\u201d He also tweeted that El Paso was \u201cthe safest city\u201d in America.<\/p>\n

Murdoch\u2019s views could scarcely be more at odds with Fox\u2019s current diatribes about hordes of \u201cillegal aliens\u201d who are \u201cinvading\u201d the U.S. and killing innocent Americans, leaving behind grieving \u201cAngel Moms\u201d and \u201cAngel Dads.\u201d Van Susteren told me that she wasn\u2019t surprised by this rhetorical turn. \u201cDon\u2019t kid yourself about his support for immigration,\u201d she said of Murdoch. \u201cRupert is first about the bottom line. They\u2019re all going out to play to their crowd, whether it\u2019s Fox or MSNBC.\u201d (After leaving Fox, Van Susteren was for a short time a host on MSNBC.) Fox\u2019s mile-by-mile coverage of the so-called \u201cmigrant caravan\u201d was an enormous hit: ratings in October, 2018, exceeded those of October, 2016\u2014the height of the Presidential campaign.<\/p>\n

Fox\u2019s embrace of Trumpism took some time. Sherman has reported that, when the network hosted the first Republican Presidential debate, in August, 2015, in Cleveland, Murdoch advised Ailes to make sure that the moderators hit Trump hard. This put Ailes in an awkward position. Trump drew tremendous ratings and had fervent supporters, and Ailes was afraid of losing that audience to rival media outlets. Breitbart, the alt-right Web site led by Stephen\u00a0K. Bannon<\/a>, was generating huge traffic by championing Trump. What\u2019s more, Ailes and Trump were friendly. \u201cThey spoke all the time,\u201d a former Fox executive says. They had lunch shortly before Trump announced his candidacy, and Ailes gave Trump political tips during the primaries. Ken LaCorte contends that Ailes took note of \u201cTrump\u2019s crazy behavior\u201d; but Trump\u2019s growing political strength was also obvious. According to the former Fox executive, Trump made Ailes \u201cnervous\u201d: \u201cHe thought Trump was a wild card. Someone Ailes could not bully or intimidate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anthony Scaramucci<\/a>, a former Fox Business host who was fleetingly President Trump\u2019s communications director, told me in 2016 that the network\u2019s executives \u201cmade a business decision\u201d to give on-air stars \u201cslack\u201d to choose their candidates. Hannity was an early Trump supporter; O\u2019Reilly was neutral; Megyn Kelly<\/a> remained skeptical. Trump had hung up on Kelly after she ran a segment about his 1992 divorce from Ivana Trump, which noted that Ivana had signed an affidavit claiming that Trump had raped her. (Ivana later insisted that she hadn\u2019t meant rape in the \u201ccriminal\u201d sense.)<\/p>\n

Against this strained backdrop, at the debate in Cleveland, Kelly asked Trump a famously tough question. \u201cYou\u2019ve called women you don\u2019t like \u2018fat pigs,\u2019 \u2018dogs,\u2019 \u2018slobs,\u2019 and \u2018disgusting animals,\u2019\u00a0\u201d she said. Trump interrupted her with a snide quip: \u201cOnly Rosie O\u2019Donnell!\u201d The hall burst into laughter and applause.<\/p>\n

Kelly kept pressing Trump: \u201cYou once told a contestant on \u2018Celebrity Apprentice\u2019 it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect President?\u201d But he\u2019d already won over Republican viewers. (Fox received a flood of e-mails, almost all of them anti-Kelly.) The showdown helped shape Trump\u2019s image as shamelessly unsinkable. It also kicked off a feud between Trump and Fox, in which Trump briefly boycotted the channel, hurting its ratings and forcing Ailes to grovel. Four days after the debate, Trump tweeted that Ailes had \u201cjust called\u201d and \u201cassures me that \u2018Trump\u2019 will be treated fairly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump has made the debate a point of pride. He recently boasted<\/a> to the Times<\/em> that he\u2019d won it despite being a novice, and despite the \u201ccrazy Megyn Kelly question.\u201d Fox, however, may have given Trump a little help. A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly\u2019s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won. The former aide says that the heads-up was passed on to Trump, who was the only candidate who said that he wouldn\u2019t automatically support the Party\u2019s nominee\u2014a position that burnished his image as an outsider.<\/p>\n

These claims are hard to evaluate: Ailes is dead, and they conflict with substantial reporting suggesting that the rift between Trump and Fox was bitter. A former campaign aide is adamant that Trump was genuinely surprised and infuriated by Kelly\u2019s question. A Fox spokesperson strongly denied the allegations, and declined requests for interviews with employees involved in the debate.<\/p>\n

Kelly also declined to comment, but she broached the subject in her 2016 memoir, \u201cSettle for More<\/a>.\u201d She wrote that the day before the debate Trump called Fox executives to complain, saying he\u2019d heard that Kelly planned to ask \u201ca very pointed question directed at him.\u201d She noted, \u201cFolks were starting to worry about Trump\u2014his level of agitation did not match the circumstances.\u201d When this passage stirred controversy, Kelly tweeted that her book \u201cdoes not suggest Trump had any debate Qs in advance, nor do I believe that he did.\u201d Yet her account does suggest that Trump had enough forewarning to be upset, and that he contacted Fox before the debate.<\/p>\n

Later in the campaign, WikiLeaks<\/a> posted stolen e-mails from Donna Brazile, then the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee and a CNN contributor. Without CNN\u2019s knowledge, she had alerted Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign<\/a> about questions that the network planned to ask during a televised event. CNN fired Brazile, and Trump has cited the incident as evidence that CNN is \u201ca total fake.\u201d Last April, in an interview on \u201cFox & Friends,\u201d he said, \u201cCan you imagine, by the way, if you gave me<\/em> the questions to a debate? They would have you out of business.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the summer of 2016, two weeks before Trump secured the Republican nomination, Gretchen Carlson, the former co-host of \u201cFox & Friends,\u201d sued Ailes for sexual harassment. Her suit alleged that he had propositioned her during a meeting, and that he\u2019d spoken of having the power to \u201cmake anything happen\u201d if she \u201cunderstood\u201d him, and that they \u201cshould have had a sexual relationship a long time ago.\u201d Within weeks, Fox had forced Ailes out, giving him a forty-million-dollar severance package. The network apologized to Carlson, and paid her a twenty-million-dollar settlement.<\/p>\n

Murdoch was slow to see the gravity of the sexual-harassment issue, but his two sons\u2014James, the C.E.O. of 21st Century Fox, and Lachlan, its executive chairman\u2014were more responsive. At a board meeting held after the news of Carlson\u2019s suit broke, James, the more politically independent of the two, pushed for an outside legal investigation. His demand forced the company to take action, since the notes of the meeting created a public paper trail. Fox\u2019s outside law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, began an inquiry, and exposed an appalling culture of sexual harassment, intimidation, payoffs, and coverups at Fox.<\/p>\n

Ailes, meanwhile, joined Trump\u2019s debate team, further erasing the line between Fox and conservative politicians. Ailes also began developing a plan to go into business with Trump. The Sunday before the election, Ailes called Steve Bannon, Trump\u2019s campaign chairman, and said that he\u2019d been talking with Trump about launching Trump TV, a nationalist competitor to Fox. Ailes was so excited that he was willing to forfeit his severance payment from Fox, which was attached to a non-compete agreement. He asked Bannon to join the venture and to start planning it as soon as Trump lost the election.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you talking about?\u201d Bannon recalls replying. \u201cWe\u2019re going to win.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStop the bullshit,\u201d Ailes responded. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a blowout. It\u2019ll be over by eight o\u2019clock.\u201d<\/p>\n

Any hopes that Fox would clean house after Ailes\u2019s departure vanished on August 12, 2016, when Fox named two Ailes loyalists as co-presidents: Jack Abernethy, an executive who managed Fox\u2019s local stations, and Bill Shine. The opinion side of Fox News, which Shine had run, had won out, as had his friend Sean Hannity.<\/p>\n

For years, Ailes had been the focus of liberal complaints, and so when Fox pushed him out many people thought that the channel would change. They were right. The problem, Fox\u2019s critics say, is that it\u2019s become a platform for Trump\u2019s authoritarianism. \u201cI know Roger Ailes was reviled,\u201d Charlie Black, the lobbyist, said. \u201cBut he did produce debates of both sides. Now Fox is just Trump, Trump, Trump.\u201d Murdoch may find this development untroubling: in 1995, he told this magazine, \u201cThe truth is\u2014and we Americans don\u2019t like to admit it\u2014that authoritarian societies can work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Greta Van Susteren believes that Ailes\u2019s departure posed a huge challenge for his successors: \u201cIt\u2019s like what happens when a dictator falls. If you look historically, when you get rid of a Saddam in Iraq, or a Qaddafi in Libya, the place falls apart.\u201d The celebrity opinion-show hosts who drive the ratings became unbridled and unopposed. Hannity, as the network\u2019s highest-rated and highest-paid star, was especially empowered\u2014and, with him, so was Trump.<\/p>\n

After Ailes was ousted, Murdoch, then eighty-five, assumed the title of acting C.E.O. of Fox News, and moved into Ailes\u2019s corner office on the second floor of News Corp\u2019s Manhattan headquarters. Lachlan and James wanted their father to hire an outsider with journalistic experience to run the channel, but Murdoch, who still thinks of himself as a newsman at heart, couldn\u2019t resist filling the top slot himself.<\/p>\n

The following winter, Murdoch slipped while on Lachlan\u2019s yacht, seriously injuring his back. For months, people close to the family say, he was in very bad shape, convalescing at home in L.A. Ken LaCorte, the former Fox executive, says that Murdoch shouldn\u2019t be discounted because of his age: \u201cHe\u2019s definitely got all his marbles, and is one hundred per cent sharp. When it came to numbers, like ratings, revenues, G.D.P. growth\u2014you name it\u2014he\u2019s like a savant. If you made a mistake with a number, he\u2019d usually catch and correct it.\u201d But a Fox insider told me that Murdoch \u201cwas gone a lot,\u201d adding, \u201cHe\u2019s old. He likes the idea that he\u2019s running it, but the lunatics took over the asylum.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Shine assumed command at Fox, the 2016 campaign was nearing its end, and Trump and Clinton were all but tied. That fall, a FoxNews.com reporter had a story that put the network\u2019s journalistic integrity to the test. Diana Falzone, who often covered the entertainment industry, had obtained proof that Trump had engaged in a sexual relationship in 2006 with a pornographic film actress calling herself Stormy Daniels. Falzone had worked on the story since March, and by October she had confirmed it with Daniels through her manager at the time, Gina Rodriguez, and with Daniels\u2019s former husband, Mike Moz, who described multiple calls from Trump. Falzone had also amassed e-mails between Daniels\u2019s attorney and Trump\u2019s lawyer Michael Cohen, detailing a proposed cash settlement, accompanied by a nondisclosure agreement. Falzone had even seen the contract.<\/p>\n

But Falzone\u2019s story didn\u2019t run\u2014it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, \u201cGood reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.\u201d LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone\u2019s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.<\/p>\n

Despite the discouragement, Falzone kept investigating, and discovered that the National Enquirer<\/em>, in partnership with Trump, had made a \u201ccatch and kill\u201d deal with Daniels\u2014buying the exclusive rights to her story in order to bury it. Falzone pitched this story to Fox, too, but it went nowhere. News of Trump\u2019s payoffs to silence Daniels, and Cohen\u2019s criminal attempts to conceal them as legal fees, remained unknown to the public until the Wall Street Journal<\/em> broke the story<\/a>, a year after Trump became President.<\/p>\n

In January, 2017, Fox demoted Falzone without explanation. That May, she sued the network. Her attorney, Nancy Erika Smith, declined to comment but acknowledged that a settlement has been reached; it includes a nondisclosure agreement that bars Falzone from talking about her work at Fox.<\/p>\n

After the Journal<\/em> story broke, Oliver Darcy, a senior media reporter for CNN, published a piece revealing that Fox had killed a Stormy Daniels story. LaCorte, who by then had left Fox but was still being paid by the company, told Mediaite<\/a> that he\u2019d made the call without talking to superiors. The story simply hadn\u2019t \u201cpassed muster,\u201d he claimed, adding, \u201cI didn\u2019t do it to protect Donald Trump.\u201d Nik Richie, a blogger who had broken the first story about Daniels, tweeted, \u201cThis is complete bullshit. Ken you are such a LIAR. This story got killed by @FoxNews at the highest level. I know, because I was one of your sources.\u201d<\/p>\n

Richie told me, \u201cFox News was culpable. I voted for Trump, and I like Fox, but they did their own \u2018catch and kill\u2019 on the story to protect him.\u201d He said that he\u2019d worked closely with Falzone on the article, and that \u201cshe did her homework\u2014she had it.\u201d He says he warned her that Fox would never run it, but \u201cwhen they killed it she was devastated.\u201d Richie believes that the story \u201cwould have swayed the election.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shine was liked by most of the on-air stars he managed; they describe him as well organized and forthright. Shine, who is tough-looking, with a doughy, dented face, is the son of a New York City policeman. After a brief period working at a Long Island television station, he went on to be Hannity\u2019s producer and rode his coattails at Fox, becoming Ailes\u2019s deputy, enabler, and enforcer. Colleagues say that Shine knew how to coach talent to look good on TV, and how to drive ratings. In 2001, he put psychics on Fox shows to offer opinions about unsolved murders, and in 2007 he defended Fox against what he called \u201cfalse racism accusations,\u201d after O\u2019Reilly expressed amazement, on the air, that people in Harlem dined at nice restaurants without \u201cany kind of craziness,\u201d just like in \u201can all-white suburb.\u201d<\/p>\n

Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group that routinely criticizes Fox News, says that Shine became \u201can expert in collecting and enforcing soft power,\u201d adding, \u201cHe was responsible for on-air contributors to programs, so ultimately you were auditioning for Bill Shine. He was the one who would give you the lucrative contract. He controlled the narrative that way.\u201d Nevertheless, some people at Fox called him Bill the Butler, because he was so subservient to Ailes. A former Fox co-host says, \u201cHe\u2019s perfect for the White House job. He\u2019s a yes-man.\u201d Another Fox alumnus said, \u201cHis only talent was following orders, sucking up to power, and covering up for people.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the fourteenth floor of the network\u2019s headquarters, the former Fox executive told me, Ailes had a \u201cBlack Ops\u201d room, where he and others collected dirt on perceived enemies. They allegedly compiled a dossier on Gabriel Sherman as he worked on his Ailes biography, and obtained the phone records of another journalist, Joe Strupp, in an effort to find out who was leaking to him.<\/p>\n

Separately, Ailes and a small group kept a close eye on internal talent. \u201cWe had a file on pretty much everyone,\u201d the former Fox executive said, adding that Ailes talked about \u201cputting hits\u201d in the media on anyone who \u201cgot out of line.\u201d If a woman complained about being sexually harassed, he said, Shine or other supervisors intimidated her into silence, reduced her air time, or discontinued her contract. The former executive recalls, \u201cShine would talk to the woman with a velvet glove, saying, \u2018Don\u2019t worry about it\u2019\u2014and, if that didn\u2019t work, he\u2019d warn her it would ruin her career.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shine\u2019s defenders maintain that he was unfairly tarnished by Ailes\u2019s harassment scandals. \u201cHe was a victim of sexual McCarthyism,\u201d LaCorte told me. Van Susteren notes that Shine \u201cwas never accused of compromising behavior\u2014he was accused of looking the other way.\u201d She adds, \u201cHe\u2019s one of those people in management who put out fires. These people often get burned themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

But at least four civil lawsuits against Fox have named Shine as a defendant for enabling workplace harassment. One of these cases, a stockholder lawsuit that Fox settled in 2017, for ninety million dollars, claimed that Ailes had \u201csexually harassed female employees and contributors with impunity for at least a decade\u201d by surrounding himself \u201cwith loyalists\u201d\u2014including Shine. The suit faults Fox for spending fifty-five million dollars to settle such claims out of court.<\/p>\n

The use of company funds for payoffs prompted a criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney\u2019s office in Manhattan. In 2017, Shine was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury, but instead he agreed to be interviewed by prosecutors. The criminal investigation seems to have been dropped after Ailes\u2019s death, but Judd Burstein, an attorney whose client was interviewed by prosecutors, told me, \u201cI don\u2019t think someone can be a serial sexual abuser in a large organization without enablers like Shine.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2011, Fox paid a news booker named Laurie Luhn $3.15 million to keep silent about two decades of sexual mistreatment by Ailes<\/a>. A copy of the confidentiality agreement shows that Shine co-signed it. The day that Ailes left Fox, Luhn broke her silence. She had sexually serviced Ailes for years, she said, in part because he had blackmailed her with compromising videotapes. According to the stockholder suit, Ailes was abetted by \u201cthe direct involvement of Shine,\u201d who scheduled the encounters as work meetings. After Luhn suffered a \u201cmental breakdown,\u201d the suit says, Shine sought a psychiatrist for her. During this period of distress, Luhn claimed, Ailes\u2019s deputies booked her into a New York hotel; Luhn has said that she was required to forward all her e-mails to Shine, for monitoring. A spokesperson for Shine has denied this account, and has said that Shine was unaware that Ailes and Luhn had a sexual relationship. The former Fox executive is dubious that Shine didn\u2019t know, and recalls Shine rolling his eyes and saying, \u201cLaurie Luhn\u2014she\u2019s<\/em> a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fox News struggled under Shine\u2019s leadership. In January, 2017, NBC lured away Megyn Kelly. (She has since left NBC.) Three months later, the Times<\/em> revealed<\/a> that 21st Century Fox and Bill O\u2019Reilly had paid a total of thirteen million dollars to five female employees who had accused him of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior. At the time, O\u2019Reilly was negotiating a thirty-two-million-dollar payment to a sixth accuser. (He has dismissed all the accusations as \u201ccrap.\u201d) The news sparked advertiser boycotts and street demonstrations, and Fox fired O\u2019Reilly. Shine soon followed him out the door.<\/p>\n

Hannity had warned that it would be \u201cthe total end\u201d of Fox News if his friend Shine were ousted. But, with O\u2019Reilly and Kelly gone, Hannity was in his strongest position yet: he was now Fox\u2019s top-rated star, and Trump\u2019s highest-profile promoter. He\u2019d taken Kelly\u2019s 9 P.M.<\/em> slot and was getting even higher ratings\u2014some three million viewers a night. Two months after Shine left Fox, Hannity became a matchmaker, arranging a dinner with the President at the White House, attended by himself, Shine, and Scaramucci, at that time Trump\u2019s communications director. Hannity proposed Shine as a top communications official, or even as a deputy chief of staff. A year later, Shine was both.<\/p>\n

By the time Trump was elected, Murdoch had adeptly improved ties with him. In the summer of 2016, he and his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, joined Trump for a visit to Trump\u2019s golf club in Scotland. Murdoch appears to have been wise in securing a rapprochement. Telecommunications is a highly regulated industry, and under Trump the government has consistently furthered Murdoch\u2019s business interests, to the detriment of his rivals. Hundt, the former F.C.C. chairman, told me that \u201cthere have been three moves that have taken place in the regulatory and antitrust world\u201d involving telecommunications \u201cthat are extremely unusual, and the only way to explain them is that they\u2019re pro-Fox, pro-Fox, and pro-Fox.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last June, after only six months of deliberation, the Trump Administration approved Fox\u2019s bid to sell most of its entertainment assets to Disney, for seventy-one billion dollars. The Murdoch family will receive more than two billion dollars in the deal, and will become a major stockholder in the combined company. The Justice Department expressed no serious antitrust concerns, even though the combined company will reportedly account for half the box-office revenue in America. Trump publicly congratulated Murdoch even before the Justice Department signed off on the deal, and claimed that it would create jobs. In fact, the consolidation is projected to result in thousands of layoffs.<\/p>\n

In July, the F.C.C. blocked Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative rival to Fox, from combining with the Tribune Media Company. The F.C.C. argued that the deal would violate limits on the number of TV stations one entity can own, upending Sinclair\u2019s hope of becoming the next Fox.<\/p>\n

The Justice Department, meanwhile, went to court in an effort to stop A.\u00a0T.\u00a0&\u00a0T.\u2019s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN. Time Warner saw the deal as essential to its survival at a time when the media business is increasingly dominated by giant competitors such as Google and Facebook. Murdoch understood this impulse: in 2014, 21st Century Fox had tried, unsuccessfully, to buy Time Warner. For him, opposing his rivals\u2019 deal was a matter of shrewd business. Trump also opposed the deal, but many people suspected that his objection was a matter of petty retaliation against CNN. Although Presidents have traditionally avoided expressing opinions about legal matters pending before the judicial branch, Trump has bluntly criticized the plan. The day after the Justice Department filed suit to stop it, he declared the proposed merger \u201cnot good for the country.\u201d Trump also claimed that he was \u201cnot going to get involved,\u201d and the Justice Department has repeatedly assured the public that he hasn\u2019t done so.<\/p>\n

However, in the late summer of 2017, a few months before the Justice Department filed suit, Trump ordered Gary Cohn<\/a>, then the director of the National Economic Council, to pressure the Justice Department to intervene. According to a well-informed source, Trump called Cohn into the Oval Office along with John Kelly, who had just become the chief of staff, and said in exasperation to Kelly, \u201cI\u2019ve been telling Cohn to get this lawsuit filed and nothing\u2019s happened! I\u2019ve mentioned it fifty times. And nothing\u2019s happened. I want to make sure it\u2019s filed. I want that deal blocked!\u201d<\/p>\n

Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs, evidently understood that it would be highly improper for a President to use the Justice Department to undermine two of the most powerful companies in the country as punishment for unfavorable news coverage, and as a reward for a competing news organization that boosted him. According to the source, as Cohn walked out of the meeting he told Kelly, \u201cDon\u2019t you fucking dare call the Justice Department. We are not going to do business that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Cohn declined to comment, and Kelly did not respond to inquiries from The New Yorker<\/em>, but a former White House official confirmed that Trump often \u201cvented\u201d in \u201cfrustration\u201d about wanting to block the A.\u00a0T.\u00a0&\u00a0T.-Time Warner merger. \u201cThe President does not understand the nuances of antitrust law or policy,\u201d the former official says. \u201cBut he wanted to bring down the hammer.\u201d (Last month, a federal court ruled against the Justice Department.)<\/p>\n

Trump Administration officials say that political considerations did not guide the government\u2019s actions on the three deals. Blair Levin, the former F.C.C. official, told me, \u201cThere may be innocent explanations.\u201d But, he adds, \u201cTrump famously said you\u2019re going to get sick and tired of winning, and that may not be true for the rest of America, but it sure is true of Murdoch.\u201d He says of Murdoch, \u201cHe\u2019s an incredibly cunning political player. He leaves no fingerprints. He\u2019s been in the game of influencing government behavior to his benefit longer than most of us have been alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Axelrod, who was Barack Obama\u2019s chief strategist, believes that Murdoch has long put his business interests above any political concerns. He recalls attending a dinner where Murdoch pushed him to move ahead on immigration reform. Axelrod suggested that it would help if Fox stopped fanning nativist hysteria, and he says that Murdoch responded, \u201cYou\u2019ll have to talk to Roger about that,\u201d as if he had no sway over Fox. Axelrod says, \u201cThere are probably a lot of aspects of Trumpism that he\u2019s uncomfortable with. But ultimately he\u2019s a businessman. And it\u2019s useful to have a friend who\u2019s the President, particularly if there are close regulatory calls, and a President who is untroubled by the rules and norms in that regard.\u201d<\/p>\n

During a recent dinner with reporters, the incendiary right-wing commentator Ann Coulter, who has been feuding with Trump over his immigration policy, said that the President told her that \u201cMurdoch calls me every day.\u201d She recalled that, \u201cback when Trump was still speaking to me,\u201d she complained to him that Fox was no longer inviting her to appear. She said that Trump told her, \u201cDo you want me to call Murdoch and tell him to put you on?\u201d Coulter accepted Trump\u2019s offer. He may have called Hannity, not Murdoch, she says, but in any case she was invited back on Fox \u201cwithin twelve hours.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Murdoch\u2019s relations with the White House have warmed, so has Fox\u2019s coverage of Trump. During the Obama years, Fox\u2019s attacks on the President could be seen as reflecting the adversarial role traditionally played by the press. With Trump\u2019s election, the network\u2019s hosts went from questioning power to defending it. Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor who co-directs the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, says, \u201cFox\u2019s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.\u201d The network has provided a non-stop counternarrative in which the only collusion is between Hillary Clinton and Russia; Robert Mueller<\/a>, the special counsel, is perpetrating a \u201ccoup\u201d by the \u201cdeep state\u201d; Trump and his associates aren\u2019t corrupt, but America\u2019s law-enforcement officials and courts are; illegal immigration isn\u2019t at a fifteen-year low, it\u2019s \u201can invasion\u201d; and news organizations that offer different perspectives are \u201cenemies of the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Benkler\u2019s assessment is based on an analysis of millions of American news stories that he and two co-authors, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, undertook for their 2018 book, \u201cNetwork Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics<\/a>.\u201d Benkler told me that he and his co-authors had expected to find \u201csymmetric polarization\u201d in the left-leaning and the right-leaning media outlets. Instead, they discovered that the two poles of America\u2019s media ecosystem function very differently. \u201cIt\u2019s not the right versus the left,\u201d Benkler says. \u201cIt\u2019s the right versus the rest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most American news outlets try to adhere to facts. When something proves erroneous, they run corrections, or, as Benkler and his co-authors write, \u201cthey check each other.\u201d Far-left Web sites post as many bogus stories as far-right ones do, but mainstream and liberal news organizations tend to ignore suspiciously extreme material. Conservative media outlets, however, focus more intently on confirming their audience\u2019s biases, and are much more susceptible to disinformation, propaganda, and outright falsehoods (as judged by neutral fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact). Case studies conducted by the authors show that lies and distortions on the right spread easily from extremist Web sites to mass-media outlets such as Fox, and only occasionally get corrected.<\/p>\n

When falsehoods are exposed, core viewers often react angrily. According to Media Matters, Fox hosts used the word \u201cinvasion\u201d thirty-three times in the thirty days before the midterm elections. After Shepard Smith, the Fox News correspondent, contradicted Trump\u2019s scaremongering about immigrants\u2014declaring, \u201cThere is no invasion, no one is coming to get you\u201d\u2014viewers lashed out at him on social media.<\/p>\n

Sometimes such pushback has a salutary effect. Recently, Chris Wallace told Sarah Sanders that her claim that \u201cnearly four thousand known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally\u201d every year was wildly inaccurate. Showing Fox\u2019s clout, the White House has dropped the talking point.<\/p>\n

Such breaks with the Trump narrative on Fox are rare, though. Unlike Glenn Beck, Hannity has been allowed to spew baseless conspiracy theories with impunity. For more than a year, Hannity and other hosts spread the lie that the hacking of Democratic Party e-mails during the 2016 campaign was an inside job. Hannity claimed that the hacking had been committed not by Russian cyber-warfare agents, as the U.S. intelligence community concluded, but by a Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, who had been murdered by unknown assailants on a D.C. street. Benkler and his co-authors studied Fox\u2019s coverage, and found that not only did the channel give the Seth Rich lie a national platform; it also used the conspiracy story as a distraction, deploying it as a competing narrative when developments in Mueller\u2019s investigation showed Trump in a bad light. In 2017, after Rich\u2019s parents demanded an apology and advertisers began shunning the network, Fox finally ran a retraction, and Hannity dropped the story.<\/p>\n

By then, Fox hosts had begun pushing a different conspiracy: the \u201cUranium One<\/a>\u201d story, which Hannity called \u201cthe biggest scandal ever involving Russia.\u201d On an October, 2017, broadcast, Hannity claimed that Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, had given \u201cto Vladimir Putin and Russia twenty per cent of America\u2019s uranium, which is the foundational material to make nuclear weapons.\u201d Ostensibly, the deal was in exchange for giant payments to the Clinton Foundation. Hannity also claimed that \u201cthe corrupt, lying mainstream media\u201d was withholding this \u201cbombshell\u201d from Americans, because it was \u201ccomplicit\u201d in a \u201chuge coverup.\u201d More than a year earlier, the Times<\/em> had run a front-page story about the deal, based on the right-wing book \u201cClinton Cash<\/a>.\u201d But the story had gone cold, because other reporting had poked holes in it, revealing that multiple government agencies had approved the deal, and that the quantity of uranium was insignificant. Yet Fox kept flogging it as the real national-security scandal involving Russia. On \u201cHannity,\u201d the former Trump White House adviser Sebastian Gorka argued that the Clintons\u2019 crime was equivalent to the Cold War treason of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg\u2014and reminded viewers that the Rosenbergs were executed. Within two days, Trump picked up Fox\u2019s story, tweeting, \u201cUranium deal to Russia, with Clinton help and Obama Administration knowledge, is the biggest story that Fake Media doesn\u2019t want to follow!\u201d<\/p>\n

Alisyn Camerota was a co-host on \u201cFox\u00a0& Friends\u201d for years before joining CNN, in 2014. She says that Fox has solid news reporters, but she became so troubled by the lack of standards on \u201cFox\u00a0& Friends\u201d that she wrote a thinly veiled novel, \u201cAmanda Wakes Up<\/a>,\u201d about the blurring of journalistic lines at a cable morning show. \u201c\u00a0\u2018Fox\u00a0& Friends\u2019 was a fun show, but it was not a news show,\u201d she says. \u201cIt regularly broke the rules of journalism. It was basically Roger\u2019s id on TV. He\u2019d wake up in the morning with some bee in his bonnet, spout it off to Bill Shine, and Shine would tell us to put it on TV.\u201d She says that the show\u2019s producers would \u201ccull far-right, crackpot Web sites\u201d for content, and adds, \u201cNever did I hear anyone worry about getting a second source. The single phrase I heard over and over was \u2018This is going to outrage the audience!\u2019 You inflame the viewers so that no one will turn away. Those<\/em> were the standards.\u201d<\/p>\n

To the astonishment of colleagues, the Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for \u201cThe Five\u201d by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism. She\u2019d share the day\u2019s planned topics with Townsend, and then he\u2019d e-mail her suggested content. A former colleague of Guilfoyle\u2019s says, \u201cIt was a joke among the production assistants\u2014they were, like, \u2018Wait till you hear this!\u2019 She actually got research from him! It was the subject of hilarity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Townsend is a frequent contributor to the fringe social-media site Gab, which Wired<\/em> has called a \u201chaven for the far right.<\/a>\u201d (He has promoted the idea that \u201cphysically weak men\u201d are \u201cmore likely to be socialists,\u201d and has argued that it is not anti-Semitic to observe that \u201cthe most powerful political moneybags in American politics are Zionists.\u201d) The server company that hosts Gab removed it from the Internet temporarily after it was revealed to have posted hate-filled rants by Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, last October.<\/p>\n

When I asked Townsend about his e-mails to Guilfoyle, he said, \u201cMind your own business. I\u2019m just a Fox fan. I\u2019m a keyboard warrior. I\u2019m a nobody.\u201d He said, \u201cI\u2019ve sent stuff to various people at Fox for years, and I don\u2019t get a penny for it,\u201d and added, \u201cI don\u2019t know what tree you\u2019re barking up but you better be careful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given Fox\u2019s status as a dominant source of information for Trump, some people argue that the network should be especially vigilant about outside influence. Aki Peritz, a former C.I.A. analyst who is an adjunct professor at American University, has written that Fox News has become an inviting target for foreign spy agencies, because \u201cit\u2019s what the President sees.\u201d But a source who spoke to me about Guilfoyle and Townsend says, \u201cIt\u2019s even worse than a conspiracy of the dark Web, or something trying to manipulate Fox. It was just a guy in his underwear in Georgia who had influence over Fox News! And Fox News influences the President!\u201d<\/p>\n

Officially, Trump\u2019s day begins at 11 A.M.<\/em>, with his national-security briefing. But Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, who has spent more than a year tracking how closely Trump\u2019s tweets correspond to Fox News, told me that \u201cthe real briefing is on \u2018Fox & Friends,\u2019 four hours earlier.\u201d Judging from the timing of Trump\u2019s tweets, Gertz believes that the President records \u201cFox & Friends\u201d and views it from the beginning, often with a slight delay. As Trump watches, he frequently posts about points that he agrees with. Since August, 2018, Media Matters has tallied more than two hundred instances of Trump disseminating Fox News items to his fifty-eight million Twitter followers. \u201cTrump serves as a carnival barker for Fox,\u201d Levin says, giving invaluable promotional help to the channel.<\/p>\n

Fox hosts sometimes reverse their opinions in order to toe the Trump line: Hannity, who in the Obama era called negotiations with North Korea \u201cdisturbing,\u201d now calls such efforts a \u201chuge foreign-policy win.\u201d But Gertz has come to believe that Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fox. During the recent standoff with Congress over funding for a border wall, Fox anchors and guests repeatedly pushed Trump to reject compromises favored by Republicans in Congress and by his own staff, and to pursue instead an extreme path favored by Fox\u2019s core viewers.<\/p>\n

White House aides confirm that Trump has repeatedly walked away from compromises at the last moment because Fox hosts and guests opposed the deals. Last March, Trump was widely expected to sign an omnibus appropriations bill, thus avoiding a government shutdown. Both Mick Mulvaney, his budget director at the time, and Vice-President Mike Pence had described it as a done deal. But on March 22nd Trump became agitated, a former top aide told me, when the evening hosts at Fox \u201clit him up,\u201d and the next morning, on \u201cFox & Friends,\u201d one of the President\u2019s most reliable supporters, Pete Hegseth, \u201cripped him.\u201d At 8:55 A.M.<\/em>, Trump tweeted that he might veto the bill, because it lacked funding for the \u201cBORDER WALL.\u201d The former top aide said of Trump\u2019s sudden reversal, \u201cIt was all Fox.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s tweet caused panic in Washington: many members of Congress had left town, and it wasn\u2019t clear that enough were present to pass a stopgap spending bill. Defense Secretary James Mattis<\/a> rushed to the White House and explained to Trump that, if he vetoed the bill, funding for U.S. troops would run out at midnight. That afternoon, Trump relented and signed the bill.<\/p>\n

Mattis prevailed in this instance, but former White House aides and other political players in Washington believe that Trump is more influenced by Fox pundits and guests than by his staff, or by the intelligence experts who brief him. Marc Short, who was formerly in charge of congressional relations for the White House, tried to counter the effect by enlisting Republican allies in the House to go on Fox. According to a Senate staffer, one high-profile Republican senator claims that his preferred way of getting the President\u2019s ear is by going on Fox. He calls a friendly host and offers to appear on the air; usually, before he\u2019s taken his makeup off in the greenroom Trump is calling him. \u201cIt\u2019s the way to get into his head,\u201d the Senate staffer says.<\/p>\n

Gertz is not alone in believing that Fox hosts played a key part in driving Trump\u2019s recent shutdown of the government and his declaration of a national emergency on the southern border. Hannity and Dobbs urged Trump nightly on their shows to make these moves; according to press reports, they also advised Trump personally to do so.<\/p>\n

On December 19th, with Republicans still in control of both houses of Congress, Trump\u2019s staff indicated that he would sign a spending bill with $1.6 billion earmarked for border security. That night, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh assailed the deal, and the next morning Fox pounded Trump. Representative Mark Meadows, of North Carolina, a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus, appeared on \u201cFox & Friends,\u201d calling the bill not a \u201cpunt\u201d but a \u201cfumble,\u201d and warning Trump not to \u201ccave.\u201d At 7:33 A.M.<\/em>, Hegseth tweeted at Trump, \u201cDon\u2019t listen to squish advisers.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. No WALL\u00a0=\u00a0SHUT IT DOWN.\u201d By the next day, Trump had refused to sign the spending bill, forcing much of the government to shut down. For the next thirty-five days, Hannity and the other Fox hosts kept cheering Trump on, even as polls showed that the American public was increasingly opposed to the shutdown. Oliver Darcy, of CNN, says that Democrats, rather than negotiating with Trump, \u201cmight as well call Sean Hannity and get him on the phone,\u201d adding, \u201cIt seems we sort of elected Sean Hannity when we elected Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gertz, of Media Matters, argues, \u201cThe President\u2019s world view is being specifically shaped by what he sees on Fox News, but Fox\u2019s goals are ratings and money, which they get by maximizing rage. It\u2019s not a message that is going to serve the rest of the country.\u201d Blair Levin, the former F.C.C. official, says that Trump and Fox are employing the same risky model: inflaming the base and intensifying its support, rather than building a broader coalition. Narrowcasting may generate billions of dollars for a cable channel, but as a governing strategy it inevitably alienates the majority. The problem for Trump, as one former Fox host puts it, is that \u201che can\u2019t afford to lose Fox, because it\u2019s all he\u2019s got.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similarly, Fox has a financial incentive to make Trump look good. Cable ratings at both Fox and MSNBC dip when the news is bad for their audience\u2019s side. Van Susteren likens the phenomenon to audiences turning away when their sports team is losing. During the Bush Administration\u2019s disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina, Fox\u2019s ratings slumped so badly, a former Fox producer told me, that he was told to stop covering it. Since the midterms, in which the Republicans lost the House, the Nielsen ratings for Fox\u2019s evening lineup\u2014Hannity, Tucker Carlson<\/a>, and Laura Ingraham<\/a>\u2014have fallen by twenty per cent. Few things cause ratings to spike like an exclusive Presidential interview, however, and on February 28th Hannity landed yet another one, during the President\u2019s meeting in Hanoi with Kim Jong Un. At one point in the interview, Hannity addressed the week\u2019s biggest news\u2014Michael Cohen\u2019s testimony before Congress<\/a>\u2014and assured viewers that, even if Stormy Daniels had been paid off before the 2016 election, the President was innocent of criminal wrongdoing. Cohen, he told Trump, had \u201csaid to me at least a dozen times that he<\/em> made the decision on the payments, and he didn\u2019t tell you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n

When Hannity lamented that the Cohen hearings had upstaged Trump\u2019s diplomatic effort, intoning, \u201cI thought politics stopped at the water\u2019s edge in America,\u201d Trump called the timing \u201creally inappropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the White House, Bill Shine, just as he did at Fox, defers to the man he calls \u201cthe boss.\u201d When Trump became irritated by the White House press corps, Shine acted as his enforcer. Disregarding the norms protecting press freedom, he tried to strip the aggressive CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta of his White House pass; he also attempted to \u201cdisinvite\u201d the CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins from covering a Rose Garden event. She had annoyed the President earlier that day with a question about Michael Cohen.<\/p>\n

Shine also berated Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the Times<\/em>, after hearing\u2014inaccurately\u2014that Baker, at a summit in Buenos Aires, had laughed when Japan\u2019s Prime Minister, Shinz\u014d Abe, congratulated Trump on his \u201chistoric victory\u201d in the midterm elections. Baker declined to comment, but a colleague of his witnessed Shine pulling Baker aside from the press pool. Shine poked a finger in his face and demanded to know if he\u2019d laughed at Trump. The incident was settled amicably after Baker sent Shine an audio recording proving that the accusation was false. But Shine\u2019s attempt to police a veteran reporter was reminiscent of the culture of intimidation at Fox News.<\/p>\n

A source close to Trump says that the President has been complaining that Shine hasn\u2019t been aggressive enough. Late last year, Trump told the source, \u201cShine promised me my press coverage would get better, but it\u2019s gotten worse.\u201d The source says, \u201cTrump thought he was getting Roger Ailes but instead he got Roger Ailes\u2019s gofer.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent months, Shine has practically ended White House press briefings. Trump prefers to be his own spokesman. \u201cHe always thought he did it the best,\u201d a former senior White House official says. \u201cBut the problem is that you lose deniability. It\u2019s become a trapeze act with no net, 24\/7. The shutdown messaging was a crisis. There was no exit strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Trump has been condemning reporters as \u201cenemies of the people,\u201d Fox News, too, has been cracking down on dissenting voices. Van Susteren was replaced by Tucker Carlson, and under the leadership of Fox\u2019s current C.E.O., Suzanne Scott, a longtime deputy of Shine\u2019s, the prime-time lineup has become more one-sided than ever. Fox has become Trump\u2019s safe space in times of stress. When he was alone in the White House on New Year\u2019s Eve, he called in to Pete Hegseth\u2019s live broadcast and wished him a happy New Year. A few weeks later, when Trump was humiliated by the news that the F.B.I. had considered launching a counterintelligence investigation of him, he called the Fox host Jeanine Pirro for on-air reassurance. Conservative critics of Trump who used to appear on Fox, such as Stephen Hayes and George Will, have largely vanished; Will told the Washington Post<\/em><\/a> that Fox discontinued his contract, in 2017, without explanation. It\u2019s almost shocking to recall that, as recently as 2009, Fox balanced Hannity with a liberal co-host, Alan Colmes.<\/p>\n

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic veteran of Bill Clinton\u2019s 1992 campaign, went on Fox regularly for more than ten years. In November, 2017, he had a heated on-air exchange with a Fox host, Melissa Francis, about the Republican tax bill. When Francis hectored him, accusing him of merely repeating talking points, he vowed on the air never to return. \u201cIt was always clear that this wasn\u2019t just another news organization,\u201d Rosenberg told me. \u201cBut when Ailes departed, and Trump was elected, the network changed. They became more combative, and started treating me like an enemy, not an opponent.\u201d With Shine joining Trump at the White House, he said, \u201cit\u2019s as if the on-air talent at Fox now have two masters\u2014the White House and the audience.\u201d In his view, the network has grown so allied with the White House in the demonization of Trump\u2019s critics that \u201cFox is no longer conservative\u2014it\u2019s anti-democratic.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Fox completes the spinoff of its entertainment properties to Disney, the news channel will be part of a much smaller company, under the day-to-day supervision of Lachlan Murdoch. Like Rupert, Lachlan is a conservative, but there\u2019s talk around Fox that he may want to bring the news network closer to the center-right. The biggest test yet of Fox\u2019s journalistic standards is the impending showdown over Mueller\u2019s findings. For two years, the network has been priming its viewers to respond with extraordinary anger should the country\u2019s law-enforcement authorities close in on the President. According to Media Matters, in the first year after Mueller was appointed Hannity alone aired four hundred and eighty-six segments attacking the federal criminal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election; thirty-eight per cent of those segments claimed that law-enforcement officials had broken the law. In recent weeks, Hannity has spoken of \u201ca coup,\u201d and a guest on Laura Ingraham\u2019s program, the lawyer Joseph diGenova, declared, \u201cIt\u2019s going to be total war. And, as I say to my friends, I do two things\u2014I vote and I buy guns.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jerry Taylor, the co-founder of the Niskanen Center, a think tank in Washington for moderates, says, \u201cIn a hypothetical world without Fox News, if President Trump were to be hit hard by the Mueller report, it would be the end of him. But, with Fox News covering his back with the Republican base, he has a fighting chance, because he has something no other President in American history has ever had at his disposal\u2014a servile propaganda operation.\u201d<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

This article appears in the print edition of the March 11, 2019, issue, with the headline \u201cTrump TV.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jane Mayer has been a staff writer at <\/em>The New Yorker since 1995. Read more \u00bb<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 newyorker.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fox\u2014which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox\u2014acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. \u201cFox is not just taking the temperature of the base\u2014it\u2019s raising the temperature,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a radicalization model.\u201d For both Trump and Fox, \u201cfear is a business strategy\u2014it keeps people watching.\u201d As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":128962,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}