Fox News Shares the Blame for Trump's Deranged, Ruinous Presidency
Trump’s White House advisers quickly learned to watch the show themselves in order to know what he was thinking. “The Fox morning show had supplanted the president’s daily intelligence briefing,” Stelter writes. “West Wing aides and lawmakers and lobbyists had to start watching the show so they could follow Trump’s tweets and orders.”
This created a feedback loop of Fox-branded disinformation. Fox producers carefully parse Trump’s tweets to set their own agenda for the day. Pleasing Trump is a high priority at the network—not only because it’s important in and of itself, as well as personally to Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who owns it, but also because Trump’s interests and perspectives dovetail perfectly with those of Fox’s audience. Pleasing Trump, therefore, is good for business, ratings, and one’s career at Fox.
The fanatic loyalty of Fox’s audience delivers some $2 billion per year of profits into the pockets of Murdoch and his family. The bulk of this comes not from advertising but from fees paid by cable systems for the right to carry Fox News. Typically, these systems pay Fox $2 dollars per subscriber per month—well more than what CNN or MSNBC nets. (CNN earns less than $1 dollar per subscriber, MSNBC only 33 cents, according to Angelo Carusone of Media Matters for America.) And Fox knows that no cable system would dare drop Fox—that would result in the rapid loss of thousands of subscribers and a likely outbreak of picketing and demonstrations outside its offices.
This is why Fox retains controversial commentators such as Tucker Carlson, whose program consists largely of race-baiting and pandering to white supremacists. Carlson’s prime-time show has cost Fox millions of dollars in advertising due to corporate boycotts, but it’s also highly rated and a key reason why cable systems pay Fox’s exorbitant fees. That’s why Carlson can afford to lose 100 percent of his advertisers and still keep his show and the millions of dollars per year Fox pays him.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159207/fox-news-trump-deranged-ruinous-presidency
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