The looming impeachment of Donald Trump has made the already-existing fissures at Fox News worse. Sad!
A recent must-read article by Gabriel Sherman noted that despite the blustery TV defiance, Trump loyalists at Fox News know he’s in deep trouble. Even Sean Hannity has reportedly admitted that the allegations are “really bad.” Rather than uniting the network on a mission of truth and principles, it seems to be having the opposite effect. Sherman writes:
Inside Fox News, tensions over Trump are becoming harder to contain as a long-running cold war between the network’s news and opinion sides turns hot. Fox has often taken a nothing-to-see-here approach to Trump scandals, but impeachment is a different animal. “It’s management bedlam,” a Fox staffer told me. “This massive thing happened, and no one knows how to cover it.”
Sherman goes on to cite the open sniping between Fox hosts Shepard Smith and Tucker Carlson which, in my view, later included Chris Wallace. The feud began after Fox’s own legal analyst opined that Trump had committed a crime when he tried to strong-arm the president of Ukraine into doing his political dirty work.
Wallace also took a not-very-subtle dig at Trumpworld (which includes many Fox personalities) when he said about the whistleblower complaint that sparked the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, “for all of the efforts of a lot of people defending the president to pretend this is nothing, it isn’t nothing. It’s something.”
Not surprisingly, “unofficial chief of staff” to Trump Sean Hannity ignored the words of his own colleague and Fox's legal expert. Hannity called the impeachment investigation “lies, conspiracy theories, and one hoax after another.”
There are even divisions inside host Tucker Carlson. Blasting Trump’s behavior in an editorial Thursday night, Carlson disparaged Trump critics on the air as if the editorial never existed.
In today’s Washington Post, reporter Sarah Ellison wrote that impeachment is “opening fresh divisions" at Fox:
On his show, Lou Dobbs recently allowed [attorney Joseph] DiGenova [sic] and his wife Victoria Toensing, an attorney, to accuse “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace of violating an off-the-record agreement. In September, Hannity chided Ingraham for cutting away too early from a Trump speech. In May, Ingraham called “America’s Newsroom,” a morning news program on Fox hosted by Bill Hemmer and Sandra Smith, to express her dismay at the way the media — including Wallace — was covering Robert Mueller’s letter to Attorney General William Barr, which critiqued Barr’s characterization of Mueller’s report. Wallace appeared on air later in the day and responded to Ingraham, though not by name.
This is not to say that Fox News is collapsing from the inside nor that Trump is in danger of losing his most powerful message machine. At least not while the network continues to draw big ratings. But according to Sherman, Fox chief Lachlan Murdoch “has been holding strategy conversations with Fox executives and anchors about how Fox News should prepare for life after Trump.”
Meanwhile, expect “management bedlam” to continue.
(Trump caricature by DonkeyHotey via Creative Commons license)