As early as Wednesday, Nov. 4, the day after polls closed around the country, supporters of President Donald Trump were amassing to protest what they believed to be a conspiracy to steal the election from their president. They wore Make America Great Again hats and waved Trump 2020 flags, and some brandished semi-automatic weapons, a familiar sight at pro-Trump rallies in open-carry states. But what was surprising this time around was that many of Trump’s supporters weren’t only harassing and decrying the usual media enemies—CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times—but were chanting “Fox News Sucks.”
In monitoring pro-Trump communications, it’s been a refrain that many of his loyalists consider Fox “fake news” and that it’s as complicit in slandering their leader as much as any of the other networks. In the same breath, they have lauded a few of Fox’s personalities, including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, while making it clear, in the same breath, that Fox is part of the “deep state” conspiracy to bring Trump down.
In Detroit, at the protests, The Guardian was able to find a supporter in shock that Fox had acquiesced and begun to depict an inconceivable reality in which Trump was being defeated by Democratic challenger Joe Biden. “Fox, you can’t even trust them,” Rob Phail lamented. “They’re the worst chameleons of all. So, you’re like, OK, who do you trust?”
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That question, which many Trumpists and media members are currently pondering, is still yet to be answered, and could change the course of American politics in ways still unimagined. With loyalists engaged in active delusion and rejection of a massive loss by their patron, an untold number are now actively searching for a news source that will confirm their most deeply held beliefs.
This “Trump News” alternative could unseat Fox News as the leader of the right-wing echo chamber and lead to the preferred alternate reality source that Trump has been so desperate for: a world where the opinions of Trump are as immutable as the laws of nature themselves.
The origins of Fox News lie in the work of Roger Ailes, a former producer for The Mike Douglas Show who joined forces with Richard Nixon in 1968 to secure the former vice-president’s first presidential victory. Ailes considered politics a “horseshit show” that bored viewers and left them cold. To remedy this, he applied his showbiz eye and tailored a series of television shows meant to portray Nixon in a more humane light. Ailes scripted the events down to the most minute detail, choosing questions to highlight Nixon’s strengths and populating the audience with his chosen members, one time even requesting someone find him a voter who might ask, “Awright, mac, what about these n----rs?”
Ailes and Nixon were successful, but after Watergate led to the president’s resignation the former often lay blame for the ouster on the so-called liberal news media and the lack of a prominent conservative voice. In the convening years, Ailes lent his talents to the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, helping to craft a plethora of advertisements and strategies that dog-whistled to the racism at the heart of the Republican Party’s base. In 1996, with the help of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Ailes engineered the launch of Fox News, saying that “Somewhere between 56 and 82 percent of American people think news is biased, negative and boring. So, let’s take 60% as the number – it looks like a marketing niche to me.”
Fox News gained traction by serving as reality producer for the Republican Party, portraying Democrats as being repulsively corrupt, socialist and anti-Christian in their ideology, and fundamentally dangerous to the United States of America. Meanwhile, ever aware of the need to conceal fine-tuned propaganda behind the veneer of respectability, Ailes touted the tagline “Fair and Balanced,” an assurance to dedicated viewers that Fox wasn’t biased in the least but portraying reality as it actually existed.
The problem was that many of Fox’s viewers took them at their word. Ailes was much too successful in indoctrinating and convincing them Fox was a nonpartisan, serious news source. By the time Barack Obama was elected in 2008, after months of slanderous attacks portraying him as a secret-Muslim socialist constitutionally ineligible for the office, viewers wondered why their Republican politicians weren’t reacting as if the apocalypse was nigh.
This presented another opening, this time for libertarian, pro-corporatists like the Koch Brothers to flood the coffers of the burgeoning Tea Party movement, providing the necessary resources to build a grassroots organization that would harness the racist paranoia of Obama, leech off the alternate reality Fox News had built, and push the Overton Window of American politics further and further right. Republicans, who had been flirting with the paranoia fringe for decades, had a clear-cut choice: oppose the growing movement and possibly lose their viability or absorb the Tea Party into itself.
Meanwhile, Ailes himself began to believe his own propaganda. Ailes told his closest allies he believed Obama was a socialist hell-bent on killing him. When former Speaker of the House John Boehner visited Ailes he described him as having “black helicopters flying all around his head.”
No one took more advantage of Fox News disappearing within its own propaganda than Donald Trump, a reality TV star who regularly appeared on the channel to offer his half-baked opinions. Trump latched onto the burgeoning birther conspiracy theory and grew a political base for himself during the Obama presidency and, by 2016, the Republican base was completely prepared to accept him as a legitimate presidential contender.
What made Trump so attractive, particularly in the beginning, was that he stood out in a massive field of primary contenders as the only candidate who spoke fluent Fox News. As had been the case for years, Republicans were adept at nodding toward the paranoid alternate reality while deftly turning conversation back toward more mainstream GOP orthodoxy, but in this instance, Trump dispatched his rivals by continually pointing out the dissonance.
In August of 2015, at the first GOP primary debate in Cleveland, Fox News host Megyn Kelly challenged Trump on his misogyny and Trump immediately fired back. Over the course of the next few days Trump would even go so far as to insinuate that Kelly had been so rude to him because she was menstruating, saying, “She had blood coming out of her wherever.” As Trump continued to gain momentum, Fox News fell into line and became his own personal propaganda tool.
That showdown set the table for the schism we’re currently watching take place around the country. Trump faced off with Fox News and Fox News blinked first.
Trump quickly became the arbiter of reality and Fox News was just along for the ride.
In the summer of 2018, a year and a half after Fox News helped secure Donald Trump’s election as the 45th president of the United States, Trump held a series of bizarre meetings with dictator Kim Jong Un. Breaking precedent, Trump continually praised Kim for his iron-fisted rule of North Korea and gushed over the way his imperiled subjects lauded him with forced praise. “I want my people to do the same,” Trump told Fox News. The Washington Post reported Trump even remarked to those around him that, after watching state-sponsored North Korean news, he was impressed by the affection shown by its media members and compared it unfavorably to Fox.
Over the course of Trump’s presidency, he has repeatedly mentioned that he believed Fox was “tough” on him and, at times, would mention that the network had “changed” or moved left. This senseless criticism originates from Trump’s inability to stand even so much as a slight straying from his orthodoxy and own personal reality, an expectation that Fox News was unable to meet even as it ventured into “dear leader” territory with its effusive coverage.
What held Fox News back from serving as Trump’s desired state-sponsored media was its original commitment to the concept of being “fair and balanced,” a lie that had long served as a means of concealing its ideological underpinnings. In covering disasters like Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, Fox News attempted repeatedly to underplay the severity even while science, empirical evidence, and the personal anecdotes of Americans proved otherwise, but it was still incapable of diving into Trump’s ever-changing paranoid reality with as much zest and vigor as Trump would have wanted.
Considering Roger Ailes’s focusing on “marketing niches” led to the founding of Fox, it’s ironic that developing niches are currently aligning to unseat its dominance in right-wing media. Trump’s incessant need for both flattery and a reality in which he is infallible gave rise to competitors unworried by the appearance of bias. As Fox News moved the Overton Window in America to the right it only meant there was more opportunity for rivals on its right, allowing challengers like One America News Network (OANN), Newsmax, and Breitbart to sell fervent Trump supporters all of the conspiracy theories and white nationalism they could ever hope to consume.
Trump’s own needs tossed gas on the developing fire. In his tweets he repeatedly criticized Fox News’ direction while highlighting OANN. His press conferences began featuring strange, eye-roll inducing questions from “journalists” asking whether the Chinese government had created the pandemic as a biological weapon. Segments claiming genocidal plots hatched by Bill Gates, George Soros, the “deep state,” Democrats, and a whole host of actors aired and then made their rounds in the poisonous right-wing ecosystems. The paranoid stew that sloshed around Trump’s mind had manifested on TV and was, for all intents and purposes, vying for his attention.
On Election Day, Trump began his morning by appearing on Fox & Friends, the same show that had made him a political figure and served as his own personal call-in program for the entirety of his presidency. His appearances were usually punctuated by the trio of hosts attempting to keep Trump on message, actively workshopping his talking points in real-time as he rambled incoherently, and sheepishly reminding him he had work to do in order to sever their segments, but now a tired Trump wanted only one thing: to highlight what he perceived as a betrayal by Fox.
“Fox has changed a lot,” he complained. “Somebody said, ‘What’s the biggest difference between this and four years ago?’ And I say Fox. It’s much different… you still have great people… but Fox is a much different place in terms of politics.”
Fox’s inability to conform completely and without reservation to Trump’s chosen reality, an action that would have necessitated the network leave behind anything approaching shared experience, was the final nail in the coffin of a long and toxic relationship. The network would go on to be the first media entity to call Arizona for Joe Biden, laying the groundwork for the momentum that would eventually cost Trump the presidency. Trump took the call personally, phoning Rupert Murdoch to “demand a retraction,” but failed to secure one.
Since then, it has become apparent that Murdoch and his media empire are actively distancing themselves from Trump, including coverage on Fox News that has framed the still-contested race as over and assuring Trump supporters the fight will continue on with or without Trump.
Over on OANN, there is no such message.
In one segment, the network declared Trump the victor of the election, citing unproven voter fraud and a plethora of conspiracies to explain how the contest had been stolen. Meanwhile, rumors swirl that Trump and associates might buy the network out or partner with it to offer an alternative to Fox News moving forward.
But the niche market demands competition, and OANN has its own competitors for Trump’s favor. On Newsmax TV, hosts have declared that they will not call the race for President-elect Biden, instead floating conspiracy theories about the election and explicitly attacking Fox for perceived disloyalty and even deference to an ongoing “coup.”
The result of competition between Fox News, OANN, Newsmax for Trump supporters remains to be seen, but what seems apparent is that with a little time, effort, money, and bad faith, Trump might very well get his propaganda tool and a far right-wing alternative might serve yet another market niche: true believers who emerged from the Fox News alternate reality and are desperate for a new universe to call their home.
