32 United States The EconomistNovember 14th 2020
1W
ith floridain the bag, at 11.20pm on
election night the party at the White
House was in full swing. Then Fox News,
playing on large television screens around
the building, punctured the mood, calling
Arizona for the Democrats—the first time a
network had projected a Republican state
to flip. Despite a complaint from the White
House to Rupert Murdoch, Fox’s boss and
one-time friend of the president, the Fox
decision desk did not budge.
Fox has been the most reliable main-
stream-media ally of Donald Trump’s ad-
ministration. Its hosts have given the pres-
ident unchallenged airtime and amplified
pro-Trump conspiracy theories from the
internet. The relationship has been mutu-
ally beneficial: since 2015 the network’s rat-
ings have risen by one-third (see chart),
and in the latest financial year Fox News
and Business generated 80% of Fox Corp’s
gross operating profit. Now, with the cred-
its ready to roll on the Trump show, the net-
work must figure out how to deal with the
exit—and wrath—of its star.
Fox has influence like no other news
outlet. About 60% of Republicans watch it
weekly, double the share of any other net-
work. When the Pew Research Centre asked
in September whether mail-in ballot fraud
was a “major problem”, 61% of Republicans
who got their tvnews from Fox agreed,
compared with 23% of Republicans who
got their news elsewhere. Mr Trump, a Fox
addict, hired its producers into the White
House and sent staff in the other direction.
But the lost election has broken the rela-
tionship. Prime-time hosts have largely
stuck to the White House’s script, Sean
Hannity declaring that “it will be impossi-
ble to ever know the true, fair, accurate
election results.” But Fox’s news anchors
have got gutsier. On November 9th Neil Ca-
vuto abruptly cut away from footage in
which the White House press secretary was
claiming fraud. After the election was
called, Fox’s website’s headline read:
“Americans take to streets in celebration
after Biden projected to win White House”.
Other Murdoch-owned outlets, includ-
ing the New York Postand Wall Street Jour-
nal, have taken a similar line. Mr Murdoch’s
friendship with Mr Trump, like most of his
alliances, appears pragmatic. In 2015,
ahead of the Republican primaries, he
tweeted: “When is Donald Trump going to
stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the
whole country?” When his British newspa-pers switched their support from the Con-
servatives to Labour in 1997, he described it
as “like two porcupines making love: very
slowly and very carefully”.
Fox is already having a prickly time.
Outside one Arizona vote-counting centre,
Trump fans chanted, “Fox News sucks!”.
Despite reporting strong earnings on No-
vember 3rd, Fox Corp’s share price dipped.
“There appears to be something below the
surface that is torpedoing the stock,” wrote
Michael Nathanson, a media analyst. “That
something might be the potential launch
of a new Trump News Network.”
Rival conservative channels that could
form the basis of such a venture are gleeful.
“Fox News viewers have been writing us
and expressing frustration with the funda-
mental shift...to a more liberal slant,” says
Charles Herring, head of One America
News, whose website has a story entitled:
“Trump Won, Fox News Admitted Its Leftist
Agenda”. “We’ve arrived at Waterloo, and
the battle is about ready to take place,” de-
clares Chris Ruddy, head of Newsmax. Mr
Ruddy says revenues from advertising—for
hearing aids, testosterone pills, hats that
prevent hair-loss, and so on—have dou-
bled in the past six months.
Yet Fox looks buoyant. Even if Mr Trump
became the star of another network, the
damage would be to advertising, which
makes up only about 30% of Fox News’s
revenue. The rest comes from the fees cable
companies pay to carry it, and 90% of those
deals are locked down for at least two years.
The Trump presidency has been a gift to
all news media. “It may not be good for
America, but it’s damn good for cbs,” Leslie
Moonves, its then-boss, remarked in 2016.
But if anything it has been better for the lib-
eral rebels. msnbchas seen its ratings al-
most treble since 2015. The New York Times,
leader of the resistance in print, has seen
subscriptions soar. Fox’s ratings under Mr
Trump have been sky high, but its share of
the total was greater in the Obama years.
The outrage business works better when
you’re not in power. 7The conservative cable network
prepares for a spell in oppositionFox News and Donald TrumpSeason two is
cancelled
Eyes right
United States, viewers of cable television*
By channel, average, mSources:Nielsen;
MoffettNathansonanalysis*Totalliveandsame-dayaudience
†Excludingnews1.51.20.90.60.30
2015 16 17 18 19CNNMSNBCFox NewsCable average†D
eanna robbins and her husband,
ranchers in a wild patch of central
Montana known as the Missouri Breaks,
fought a blizzard this week. They ploughed
through knee-deep snow, spending hours
to find a herd of black Angus cattle. Then, to
feed the cows, they had to dig out bales of
buried hay. “We were trudging through
drifts, it’s hard work,” she says, but she rel-
ished every moment of it. “It has to be in
your blood,” she says. Her family have been
ranchers in Montana for the past century.
Could anything chase her out? She dis-
likes her neighbours. Abutting her sprawl-
ing ranch on three sides is federal land that
is being incorporated into a wildlife park.
The American Prairie Reserve (apr) was
founded as a charity in 2001 and aspires to
become the largest park in the Lower 48
states. Already it stretches over nearly
420,000 acres (from 29 ranches it has
bought so far), and will eventually grow
and stitch together another 2.75m acres of
public land. Its aim is for prairie dogs, sage
grouse, coyote, bighorn sheep and other
species of native plants, birds and mam-
mals to thrive in a contiguous space the
size of Connecticut.
For environmentalists, scientists and
the apr’s donors—notably wealthy Silicon
Valley folk—this is a bold, market-friendly
experiment in massive conservation. The
area is precious: one of only four vast, tem-LEWISTOWN, MONTANA
America’s answer to the Serengeti is
spreading in MontanaRewilding the prairieWhere the wild
things are