A glance at the headlines would have you believe Fox News is on the ropes. Its former chairman, CEO and spiritual leader, Roger Ailes, has not only been ousted but buried under a pile of sexual abuse allegations. New horror stories from female employees trickle out every week, with top brass implicated in a pervasive culture of misogyny and harassment. Meanwhile, its audience is dying off: the median Fox viewer is 67 yearsold, according to Nielsen.
All these things are true, and tend to fuel speculation that the network will have to clean house, name a successor, and move away from fire and brimstone toward a fresher, gentler Fox News.
That possibility is shrinking faster than Donald Trump’s poll numbers. On Friday, with a certain Spartan vibe, Rupert Murdoch created a new Fox News co-presidency shared by longtime Ailes lieutenant Bill Shine, who may yet be implicated in enabling Fox’s epidemic of sexual abuse, and local TV chief Jack Abernethy. It was a symbolic double-promotion, but both are under daddy’s supervision.
The true successor to Ailes – who is still fighting the abuse allegations and vehemently denies wrongdoing – will be the next CEO and chairman. Candidates range from insiders such as executive editor John Moody and head of news Jay Wallace to superstar outsiders such as CBS president David Rhodes. But whoever shows up won’t have anything close to the control of “the Chairman”, whose influence at Fox operates on a genetic level.
Ailes has been banished, but the creature he electrified to life two decades ago now roams free on its own.
“Don’t expect them to make a big change in their coverage,” said Jane Hall, former Fox contributor and professor of media studies at American University. “It’s a highly successful formula.”
Fox is a money monster, pumping out over $1bn in profits a year. It rakes in about 20% of 21st Century Fox’s earnings, the most profitable unit in the empire. Perhaps that’s why the Murdoch brothers, Lachlan and James, heirs to News Corp patriarch Rupert and no fans of Ailes, told investors last week that they had no intention of tinkering with the “unique and important voice” of their moneymaker.
Despite all the drama, former employees say that Fox is a money machine that can run the way it always has – and make the profits it always has – in a post-Ailes era.
“The network can coast for years just on the institutional memory,” said Joe Muto, who worked as a producer for Fox star Bill O’Reilly for eight years before eventually going out in a blaze of glory after dishing the dirt on his employer to Gawker.
“Ailes wanted to be successful, powerful and, yes, wanted to push his ideology,” Muto said. “Murdoch, I think, is less ideological, but he will default to whatever makes him money. And Fox has been a piggy bank. You look at their balance sheet and Fox underwrites other losses.”
The idea that a new CEO could steer Fox into something closer to CNN, or the smaller, friendlier conservative outlet Newsmax, presupposes that the profit motive is not driving one of the biggest media conglomerates on the planet. Not only does it continue to dominate ratings, it’s such an essential part of America’s media diet that most of its money comes from “carriage” fees paid by the cable companies.
And then there’s the very good chance that this fall, voters will gift Fox another Clinton in the White House. Not only would it keep the network in the simple, righteous role of loyal opposition to liberal tyranny, it would also be a great return to the climate of Clinton-bashing that put Fox on the map back in the 90s.
“I think a Hillary presidency would guarantee the network maintains its rightwing bent for a few more years, even with the Murdoch brothers in control,” said one ex-producer. Muto had a colorful metaphor at the ready: “I would compare it to Batman and the Joker. Batman is a much more interesting character when he has the Joker as a foil. And Hillary Clinton is the Joker to Fox’s Batman.”
If Trump won, the network would have a trickier time. For one thing, Fox generally does better under a Democratic reign. It’s true that the network became No 1 under Bush’s first term, but that was no doubt fuelled by the nonstop drama of 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, a climate of paranoia, and the culmination of the Iraq war – which, of course, Fox helped sell skillfully. “I don’t know how it would have played out without 9/11 and the Iraq war,” Hall said.
But eventually, Bush proved to be thin gruel, ratings-wise. “I think Bush winning in ’04 was a triumph for the network, but it went downhill quickly from there,” Muto said. “The war started going badly. Hurricane Katrina happened. There was this sense that the network was having trouble carrying water for Bush any more. There was an overall sense of doom at Fox between Katrina and when the 2008 primaries began heating up.”
The ratings tell that story: from 2006 to 2007, Fox dropped to 1.4 million average viewers, down from 1.7 million a year before, according to Nielsen. By the end of 2008, they had shot up to 2 million.
“It felt like the network was licking its chops for Hillary in 2008,” said Muto. “‘Our old nemesis is back.’ Then when Obama showed up, it was even better.” By 2009, the numbers were up to almost 2.2 million. Ratings have dipped in the latter half of Obama’s second term, but a Clinton regime could be just the thing to reignite the base.
“They can continue to attack the flaws of Bill Clinton through her,” said Hall. “She’s also, obviously, a woman. I’m sure that if she wins they’ll go after her as a ‘socialist’, go after her in every way, personally. She’s much better for them.”
Trump, on the other hand, would probably continue to fracture any sense of unity on the right, which is no good for Fox’s narratives of right v wrong, secular liberals v decent Americans. Then there’s just Trump’s unpredictability.
“To me, the worst thing that can happen for the network is Trump gets elected,” said Muto. “The prospect of carrying his water for four or eight years is unthinkable. Hannity will obviously give it a shot, Fox and Friends will try as hard as they can. But when you have him attacking the parents of war heroes, Fox is not gonna defend that for that long.”
Politics aside, Fox has a more concrete problem. The generational scare is real: the 25-54 demographic is only 17% of its audience and younger conservatives are generally far less interested in enlisting to fight against the “war on Christmas”. Its digital presence, the portal to that treasured younger audience, is lacking. Among competitors like CNN (which spent $20m expanding online operations), Yahoo, BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, last year Fox ranked third place in multi-platform views, sixth place in video streams, and trailed on social.
Fox gets good play on Facebook, but that’s thanks to brand recognition rather than deliberate strategy or forging partnerships with emerging distributors like Snapchat. “Digital always did seem like it was never part of the strategy – that was never the thinking,” Muto said. “The whole network was very ratings-focused, short-sighted. If they want to attract a younger audience and eyeballs on digital, they need to recruit some new talent who knows how to do that.”
An ex-producer agrees: “One of the more puzzling things about Fox News is that they actually do have some legitimately talented field reporters – people who could conceivably get a scoop, break it on Twitter, and post an article that goes viral. But they don’t really do that ever.”
“CNN has become the model for this, and part of me thinks Roger long wanted to resist copying them lest he admit they did something better,” the onetime employee said.
Perhaps now with Ailes gone, and President Hillary Clinton possibly on the way, Fox can get started on catching up.
Fox News did not respond to requests for comment.
