President Donald Trump turned on Fox News in a string of Truth Social posts Tuesday night, blaming the network he has long championed for the Republican Party’s midterm losses as Democratic wins rolled in, CNBC reported.
In one post, Trump wrote that Fox “bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition.” In another, he pointed to the network’s audience decline: “FoxNews Ratings are way down (27%!) because they’re spending too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats! All of those people who used to watch Fox, and no longer do, get it. It’s them, not me.” The claims are Trump’s; he offered no evidence that the network’s coverage caused the results.
President Donald Trump (Daniel Torok / The White House, public domain).
Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment, CNBC reported.
The network reported last week that it averaged 1.1 million viewers in October, down about 27% from a year earlier. Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch acknowledged the drop on the company’s quarterly earnings call Monday, attributing it to “viewer fatigue” ahead of a midterm with a second-term president, not to viewers defecting to rivals. “Those viewers are not going to any other news channel. They’re not switching to MS NOW or to CNN,” he said. “They’re just fatigued and watching slightly less television overall.” MS NOW averaged 588,000 viewers in October and CNN 402,000 across all day parts, according to Nielsen data cited by Fox; both were up by double digits in primetime but remain smaller overall.
Ratings and revenue told different stories: Fox Corp. – which includes the Fox broadcast network, sports, entertainment and streaming alongside Fox News – reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of $4.57 billion, up 22% year over year, with advertising revenue up 47% on political ads and FIFA World Cup coverage, according to the company.
The attack breaks with one of Trump’s friendliest media relationships. He is a frequent critic of broadcasters he views as biased against him, but has long favored Fox and appeared on its “Hannity” program Monday night, on the eve of the election.
What it means for you: when the president publicly blames Fox, the pressure lands on a network many of his voters still trust most – and on whether its coverage of him shifts. For now, the audience decline Fox itself reported is broad TV fatigue, per its own CEO, while the business is growing; the fight is about who controls the story of why Republicans lost.
JBizNews Desk | Washington
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