How Democrats are helping restore Fox News to cable dominance | Semafor

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Just hours after being offered a debate by Fox News on Oct. 9, Donald Trump rejected the overture from the conservative television news network that has for a generation been the voice of his party’s base in the US media.

That was inconvenient, most of all, for Kamala Harris’ campaign, which had not replied to the network and was seriously considering accepting the invitation. But while Trump denied Fox in the moment, that role reversal was a sign of the network’s unexpected strength in 2024.

Fox — trapped in the declining cable business, reeling from massive 2020 defamation lawsuits, and despised by American Democrats — has despite it all emerged as a preeminent broadcaster in the final stretch of the presidential campaign. The network has continued to top cable news ratings, averaging 1,571,000 total-day viewers and 2,641,000 primetime viewers last quarter, which the network boasts surpassed ratings for traditional broadcasters ABC and CBS. The top 13 cable news shows among the key 25-54 age group were all on Fox.

And Fox expects this to be great for business: “We do expect a very robust political cycle, and we think a record political cycle, [excluding] the Georgia runoff four years ago,” CEO Lachlan Murdoch said on an earnings call in August, responding to a question about television advertising.

The clearest evidence of that robustness: Fox was the only major television outlet to interview all four people on the presidential ticket this week.

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Last week, the vice president agreed to a rare half-hour interview with Fox anchor Bret Baier, the network’s first big sit-down with a Democratic presidential nominee since Hillary Clinton spoke to Chris Wallace in 2016. Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has appeared on the network twice this month, and will likely appear on it again before Election Day.

Despite his regular complaints that the network isn’t friendly enough to him, Trump was essentially living this week at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, the headquarters of Fox News parent News Corp in New York. On Thursday, he sat down with the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section, which described him as “more confident and certainly more knowledgeable about policy than he was in 2015,” and Outkick, a Fox Corp-owned sports media company. On Friday, he was back in the building early for an appearance on Fox & Friends (his second this week on the channel), taking questions about his favorite farm animal, before heading upstairs to meet with Rupert Murdoch and the leadership of the New York Post.

At 93 years old, Murdoch has relinquished nearly all of his official business duties and handed day-to-day control of the company to his son Lachlan, who largely splits his time between Los Angeles and Australia. But the News Corp founder continues to make his presence known, appearing in court in Nevada last month to battle it out over control of who inherits his media empire when he dies. One person familiar with the details of last week’s meeting with Trump said it was relatively friendly, as the two have known each other for decades and have talked regularly over the years.

A Fox Corp spokesperson declined to comment on the meeting or its contents.

Murdoch has occasionally been quoted expressing private disdain for Trump — he described Trump as “mad” after the 2020 election in an email that emerged in a defamation lawsuit — and the network sporadically seeks to break free of him, most recently via its early enthusiasm for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s failed GOP primary campaign.

Trump’s deep connection with Fox’s audience, who briefly deserted the network in 2020 when it refused to indulge some of his wilder theories of election fraud, has given him the upper hand. Still, Fox benefits from the connection: No other president has so regularly dialed up weekend anchors or has been able to name so many truly obscure contributors and guests off the top of their head.

It’s the Democratic side’s perspective on Fox that is more intriguing — and more evidence of the drift to the right of the American political discourse.

The conservative television network has long been a target for Democrats infuriated by its highly-rated programming and Trump boosterism. During the 2020 primary, left-leaning groups like Media Matters blasted candidates who appeared on the network, including Pete Buttigieg and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar. Onetime frontrunner Sen. Elizabeth Warren boycotted the network and used her rivals’ appearances on Fox as a campaign tool against them. In a series of social media posts, Warren said she “won’t ask millions of Democratic primary voters to tune into an outlet that profits from racism and hate in order to see our candidates — especially when Fox will make even more money adding our valuable audience to their ratings numbers.”

Harris was also among those who bypassed the network in the 2020 Democratic primary. But like Warren, who recently participated in an interview with Fox Business, the vice president has been willing to withhold her criticism of the network as she attempts to convince some of its right-leaning viewers to begrudgingly vote for her (or at least not vote for Trump). As they weighed an invitation from Fox to sit for an interview this fall, the campaign’s top leadership, including Harris, decided an appearance on Fox would allow her to correct misconceptions about her, and demonstrate her willingness to engage with different political perspectives.

By necessity, as the campaign scrambles to introduce her to voters as quickly as possible, Harris’ strategy is to maximize attention for her message.

The Fox interview may have helped accomplish that: Harris’ interview racked up over 10 million viewers across multiple broadcasts, as well as countless more through the chunks shared online and by other news outlets. Fox said after the interview that it was the highest rated non-primetime interview in the history of cable news. One person familiar with the campaign’s thinking said they were slightly taken aback by how high the ratings were.

One of the people paying close attention was Trump himself.

This week, Trump tweeted repeatedly complained about recent daytime appearances by Harris spokesperson Ian Sams. The campaign delighted at the provocation, and offered up Sams again as a guest on Friday. Fox declined, a Harris campaign source told Semafor.

Recent appearances by Harris, along with Buttigieg and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, are also an acknowledgement that Democrats, amid what they hope will be a political realignment, believe that Fox’s audience contains some potential Democratic voters. Some of Democrats’ next generation of stars, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Buttigieg, have repeatedly made that point by appearing on the network throughout Biden’s term and during the 2024 campaign, calmly dodging or deflecting questions.

Democrats have also been more willing to spend money advertising on the network: The primary super PAC supporting Harris, Future Forward, has been buying ads on the network regularly, prompting Trump to publicly call for Fox to stop running negative ads.

Democrats’ recent flirtation with Fox also reflects a changing of attitudes. Top Harris aides also do not harbor the same personal grievances with Fox that Biden’s team did.

Late last year, the Biden campaign invited Fox News’ election team to the president’s Delaware campaign offices to lay out a case for why the incumbent president would win, and to create open lines of communication between Fox journalists and the campaign’s comms team. While the meeting was more cordial than similar meetings the Biden team had with other outlets, the Biden team did not have any plans to participate in any campaign events with Fox News, which had, it argued, covered Biden’s aging unfairly and focused on parts of the president’s family life.

Anita Dunn, one of Biden’s top strategists, has harbored reservations about Fox dating back to her time in the Obama administration, when she stopped sending surrogates onto the network, citing “beyond diminishing returns.”

Others in the Harris team have at least slightly better relationships with Fox. Stephanie Cutter, a top Harris communications official, has appeared on the network several times in recent years as a surrogate for Democrats.