‘They forgot the Golden Goose’: Trump slams Fox News after election defeat

President Donald Trump spent part of Thursday fixing one of his favorite grievances: the media coverage he considers unfair to him. In this case, Trump’s target was not the usual suspects on MSNBC or CNN. It was Fox News.

The series of tweets and retweets posted by the president seemed to amount to a declaration of war on a network that has done so much to help him over the years.

Trump started the day otherwise dominated by coverage of record levels of coronavirus infections and hospitalizations by retweeting a series of random responses to a tweet posted by Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld promoting straighter alternatives to Fox – things like “#foxnews is dead”, “Left Fox 4 NewsMaxxxxx” and “Newsmax and Oann are great alternatives.” He then offered his own tweet in which he called himself “the golden goose” and lied on Fox News ratings. (The network still enjoys the best ratings in cable news.)

“The @ FoxNews day ratings have completely collapsed. On weekends, even WORSE. Very sad to see this happen, but they forgot what made them succeed, what got them there. They forgot about the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 and 2020 elections was @FoxNews! Trump wrote.

Trump has carefully exempted Fox News’ prime-time programming talent – Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham – from his wrath. Indeed, hours after attacking the network, Trump tweeted excerpts from Sean Hannity’s show disseminating baseless conspiracy theories about transferring votes from him to Joe Biden that had been debunked hours earlier by his own government.

Hannity’s segment was not an aberration. As Peter Kafka detailed for Recode in an article on how Fox News helps Trump disseminate voter fraud conspiracy theories, Hannity, Ingraham, and Carlson all made segments – sometimes collaborating with Republican Party officials – in which they suggested without evidence that it is plausible that Trump “was the victim of massive electoral fraud that cost him the election while simultaneously defeating the Democratic House and Senate candidates.”

For Trump, however, a little is not enough. He expects complete loyalty from Fox News, and it is an unforgivable sin that the network news won’t give it to him.

Arizona Fox News call for Biden was a major turning point

Trump’s frustrations with Fox News have grown since at least the early days of the 2020 campaign. He is regularly criticized over Fox polls showing Biden beating him and the network occasionally interviewing Democrats.

But a critical point in the Trump-Fox relationship came on election night, when Fox News’ appeal from Arizona put the first nail in the president’s political coffin.

As Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported, Fox’s appeal – which may have been premature but ultimately justified by Biden’s victory in Arizona – sent Trump into a downfall:

What followed for Mr Trump was a night of angry appeals to Republican governors and campaign aide tips he ignored, leading to a midnight presidential briefing in which he made a series of reckless and unfounded remarks about the Democrat. process. Standing in the East Room at 2:30 a.m., he dismissed the election as a “fraud” and said he wanted to stop the counting of the votes and leave the results to the Supreme Court.

In the end, Fox News’ appeal played no role in Trump’s eventual defeat – the votes that sealed Trump’s fate had already been cast on election night. But it nonetheless became water for a “stab in the back” story.

On a related note, when Fox News called Biden’s entire election last Saturday, network news presenters quickly began calling Biden a “president-elect” – a designation indicating they were not going. indulge in Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen from him.

That’s not to say Fox News’ coverage of Trump’s defeat was a model of journalistic integrity. Daytime presenters allowed Trumpworld guests to spread conspiracy theories about voter fraud without pushing back at all, and Fox News White House correspondent John Roberts has repeatedly given the Republican oxygen fantasies about the 2020 elections unfolding like 2000 or Trump overturning the election results with the help of the GOP state legislatures.

If this all seems a little inconsistent, that’s because it is. As CNN reporter Brian Stelter told my colleague Sean Illing in a new question-and-answer period, Fox’s coverage since the election call has attempted to spin the needle in acknowledging Biden’s victory without alienate Trump supporters who buy baseless conspiracy theories on election theft:

They cover Biden, the president-elect, in one breath, and then imagine voter fraud in the next breath. And remember, Fox is a collection of shows that barely speak to each other. There is some cross-pollination, but most opinion broadcasts have impressive autonomy. News anchors like Neil Cavuto will continue to do reality-based journalism, and Sean Hannity or Mark Levin will continue to do what they do.

But “reality-based journalism” is an affront to the president when he engages in a reality he doesn’t like. And so Trump has turned to promoting outlets that fully meet his MAGA fantasies.

Trump TV could still become a thing

While Trump refuses to publicly acknowledge that his days in the White House are now numbered, Mike Allen of Axios reported Thursday that in private he “had told friends he wanted to start a digital media business to crush Fox News and undermine the Conservative Party. network. ”Maggie Haberman confirmed this report, but added that Trump could eventually“ partner with an existing property like OANN or Newsmax ”.

Fox News’s post-election treatment of Trump, sometimes based on reality, appears to alienate part of the MAGA base. Newsmax ratings have risen as that network refuses to even acknowledge that Biden is president-elect. My colleague Emily VanDerWerff immersed herself in two days of Newsmax coverage after the election and explained how her emerging programming model would position itself as an even more deceptive alternative to Fox News:

The race to defeat Trump’s diehards is the real battle Newsmax finds itself in. The network is unlikely to overtake Fox News in ratings, but if it can reduce Fox News’ audience it could easily become a credible alternative among an audience that simply wants to know more about the progress of Fox News. Trump, with occasional stock price checks. (Covid-19 was barely mentioned in the Newsmax coverage that I watched.)

On a deeper level, of course, it’s tragic that the president is spending his final days in the White House focusing on media grievances and his future plans instead of taking immediate action to deal with the worsening the coronavirus pandemic. But it is extremely important to Trump.

It is also extremely corrosive to democracy. By fanning the flames of the idea that the election was stolen from him, the president is delegitimizing the US elections. And while allowing that effort to be a bridge too far for Fox News’ Neil Cavutos and Chris Wallaces, the most-watched figures on the network, like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, remain in tune with Trump.