Fox News is enjoying an extended victory lap. At the age of 93, Rupert Murdoch took a life-capping gamble, dropped whatever reservations he once had about Donald Trump, and bet the network on a Trump triumph. This will be his most lasting imprint on history.
And yet…this is not quite the coup it seems to be. It can, instead, be seen as the last hurrah for Fox News as an indispensable force multiplier for Trump. Murdoch’s long run as an omnipotent influencer has suddenly been terminated by the hypercharged, world-bestriding rocket man Elon Musk.
On July 13, hours after a sniper came within a whisker of assassinating Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Musk publicly endorsed him for president.
In the following three months Musk’s America PAC (he is its only donor) pumped an estimated $200 million into helping elect Trump. He used X, where he has more than 200 million followers, as an incessant source of misinformation in supporting Trump. His AI image generator, Grok, has been used to produce a cascade of deep fakes. According to the fact-checking group PolitiFact, in just two weeks in October, 450 X posts by Musk, which received nearly 679 million views, were rank with misinformation. Musk, now a mainstay at Mar-a-Lago, has reportedly been central to Trump’s transition process and was tapped to help lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (whatever that’ll be).
At the same time, cable news channels are fighting for a slice of a market that isn’t growing and represents a relatively small part of the electorate. Among them, Fox News remains the strongest performer. Its ratings averaged 9.2 million people during the time of Trump’s 92-minute acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on the night of July 18. The network was averaging around 3.5 million prime time viewers in July, but by September, that number slumped to an average of 1.7 million. Fox News rebounded in prime time to 2.8 million in October, and has seen an uptick since Trump’s triumph, averaging 3.3 million in prime time. MSNBC’s ratings, meanwhile, have plunged 53 percent since October, as reported by The New York Times.
But even with that performance, which sustained Fox as a lucrative cash cow for Murdoch, the reality was that Fox News was of no longer any use to Trump in what was needed to be done to win—to extend the Trump vote beyond the Trump base. The Fox audience was a reliably loyal part of that base, but far short of being the whole. In fact, one Murdoch-ordered move had already led to a flight of MAGA loyalists from Fox—the firing of Tucker Carlson, the most-watched cable news prime time voice, in May 2023. This led to a 20% decline in Fox’s prime time average audiences.
Carlson had visibly started to use Fox as a vehicle for his own political ambitions, by, for example, going all-in on framing immigrants as part of the racist replacement conspiracy. In doing so, Carlson was following a track that would soon lead him to the same rhetoric as JD Vance—and Musk. Carlson ended up as a warm-up act at Trump rallies.
In one alarmingly pervy performance, he resembled a prep school teacher you wouldn’t want anywhere near your kids. He ranted, with knitted brow and in a highly pitched voice, that “Dad” is coming home to deliver “a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl,” perhaps to daughters attempting to assert their own bodily autonomy. It was a vision unthinkable even at Fox News, where Murdoch permitted nobody to hijack his own channel, no matter how good their ratings.
During the election campaign, anchors on the opposing MSNBC channel were apt to refer to Fox as “Trump TV” as it aired some of the more fawning clips from the Fox coverage, but it’s never been that. All along it was Murdoch TV. To think otherwise is to oblige Murdoch by shifting accountability away from him, something he’s always happy to see.
As the campaign reached its final 21 days, Trump arrived at the curvy-couch of Fox & Friends and said he was due to meet Murdoch and request that Fox not run any commercials hostile to him for the rest of the campaign—“Rupert please do it this way and then we’re going to have a victory cause everyone wants that,” implying a level of influence that Murdoch would never acknowledge in public or private. (Fox News continued to run negative ads on Trump.)
Perhaps it was a final act of homage to a man that Trump really knew he no longer needed.
Nothing in Murdoch’s long history as a major media player matched the influence that came to him after Trump came down the golden escalator. The confluence of the Trump cult and Fox News served both the Trump and Murdoch agendas—a transaction in which Trump would gradually subsume the Republican Party into a personal project abetted by a network that abandoned all rules in order to serve that end. In 2016, Murdoch finally got what he had long wanted and been denied—a president who would serve his views and interests.
In return, the abasement of Fox News during the pandemic was absolute. Murdoch showed no sign of having any scruples about how Fox covered Trump’s handling of the crisis. This is the man who couldn’t wait to get a COVID shot as soon as they were available in England, where he was then living, while Fox News was demonizing Anthony Fauci and giving airtime to anti-vaccine rhetoric, creating a mindset that resulted in the preventable deaths of thousands of people.
But that embrace was not enough to give Trump a second term in 2020. And on January 8, 2021, after watching the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol incited by Trump, Murdoch emailed a former executive of Fox News: “Fox News is very busy pivoting…we want to make Trump a non person.”
That never happened. Although for a while, Fox News switched its allegiance to Florida governor Ron DeSantis as the likeliest Republican successor to Trump, Murdoch eventually recognized that there was only one Trump, and that Fox News and Trump were locked in a mutual fate. Until they weren’t.
We’ve yet to understand the full political impact of Musk unleashed. The rewiring of the media ecology has occurred almost invisibly. It’s unclear, precisely, how many young male voters gained by leaning heavily into podcasts, though he did improve in this demographic (as well as several others). The only clear thing is that the Trump campaign, with the help of Musk’s bottomless pockets, found a magic sauce somewhere.
In the 1980s, Murdoch redefined what a modern media mogul could be, by going global and seeking the power and influence that came with that business model— and inspiring the power-porn version of himself as Logan Roy in Succession.
Claire Enders, a widely respected media analyst and longtime Murdoch tracker, told me: “Murdoch was immeasurably influential during many decades and in many countries, often through quiet phone calls proffering advice, rather than obvious editorial positions, although of course there were many of those too.”
Musk’s style could not be more different. He is ever present with Trump, accompanying him to Washington on Wednesday, where Trump met with Joe Biden and congressional Republicans. Musk has been publicy advocating for positions favorable to Trump on X and, in Florida, being wildly importunate in meetings and hogging photo ops. “Elon won’t go home” Trump said, only half-joking. How long will that last?
It’s too soon to write an epitaph; the battle over the dynastic succession, between Rupert and his own chosen successor, Lachlan Murdoch, and other members of the Murdoch family trust, led by James Murdoch, is in limbo, awaiting a decision in an obscure Reno courtroom, where the battle for control is playing out.
There is speculation that were the “irrevocable” original family trust to remain irrevocable, blocking Lachlan’s ascent at the time of his father’s death, James and the other siblings would want to clean up their inheritance by selling Fox News. Estimates of its value I have heard from well-placed sources are between $13 billion and $15 billion. In 2022, Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter. Buying Fox News would be tempting for him, as a legacy media brand he could transform in the way he transformed Twitter, as part of the new world order that he seems already to be shaping.
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