There is a well-understood business arrangement between Donald Trump and Fox News. Fox gives Trump hours of friendly airtime, interviews on demand, golf with the hosts and invitations to the good dinners. Trump gives Fox the thing it actually sells, which is the undivided attention of his voters. Like many business arrangements, it works beautifully right up until one side decides the other isn’t holding up its end — at which point it stops being a partnership and starts being a negotiation, conducted in public, on social media.
On Saturday, Trump opened a renegotiation. Posting on his own platform, Truth Social, he listed the campaign rallies he had held over the previous two days in Ohio, Alabama, Texas and Oklahoma — all, he said, sold out, with thousands more trying to get in, “better than ever and completely amazing” was the gist — and then turned to Fox News, which he said had failed to cover them. His warning, according to South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo, was that Fox had “tried something similar just before an election in the past, and nearly went out of business, and it could happen again.”
Let us just sit with the premise there, because it is a remarkable thing for a president to say out loud. The premise is that Fox News is commercially dependent on carrying Donald Trump’s rallies — that its audience is his audience, and that if it stops covering him the way he wants, its viewers will leave and the network will, in his telling, die. The threat isn’t regulatory. It’s more elegant than that. It’s market-based. He is the product.
The incentives lately have gotten complicated
The context, per the Chosun Ilbo’s reporting, is that the famously comfortable relationship — Trump is said to watch Fox more than any other channel, to chat freely and play golf with Sean Hannity and Bret Baier, and to have given the network’s people near-countless interviews since returning to office — has developed some friction. Fox host Jesse Watters and other network figures were invited to the state dinner Trump hosted for Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House on September 24. But lately the network has, on a few issues, broken ranks.
One flashpoint: last month, Fox fired Maria Bartiromo, a Trump ally who in July had tried to air his claim, made in a national address, that China had interfered in the 2020 election. Trump publicly criticized the firing, saying her “many fans” would not welcome the news. When a president describes a programming decision at a news channel as a personal injury involving one of his loyalists, the news channel is no longer entirely in the news business, at least from his side of the desk.
Another: when Trump barred CNN and other outlets from the White House press pool last month, Fox’s own conservative panelists objected — calling the move “not a solution,” warning that “someday we could be banned too,” and saying it raised “serious constitutional questions.” That is Fox’s coverage behaving, briefly, like coverage rather than programming, and it seems to have been noted at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Trump’s instruction to the network, per Chosun, was to “report what’s happening to us, not the forces against America’s greatness” — otherwise Fox would “soon post ratings on the level of fake news CNN or MS NOW.” Which is a tidy summary of the whole model: the wall between state and friendly media isn’t a wall at all, it’s a ratings covenant, and the president just put the network on notice that he’s watching the figure.