‘Trump’s network’: Fox News is riding high after election night blowout

When he appeared on a Fox News panel days after the presidential election, smirking and answering questions about his potential role in president-elect Donald Trump’s administration, it was already a very good week for Senator Marco Rubio.

“He’s going to make great choices,” said Rubio, avoiding any definitive answers. “He had really good people working with him the first time and he’s got really good people working on it now.”

Of course, Rubio has now been tapped to become the next secretary of state, joining a growing list of cabinet appointments who were either regular fixtures or paid contributors to Fox News – the once embattled broadcaster now primed to win big under a second Trump presidency.

On election night it was Rupert Murdoch’s network that absolutely decimated CNN, scoring millions more viewers than its liberal-leaning rival. While one Fox News host described Trump as “a phoenix from the ashes”, the positive vibes that night were a far cry from 2020, when the network enraged him by declaring Arizona for Joe Biden.

Prior to its recent gain in viewership, Fox News has had a recently tumultuous run: the libelous Dominion voting machine scandal cost it $787.5m; it bled audiences to rightwing upstarts NewsMax and One American News Network (OANN); and then there was the infamous firing of popular primetime host Tucker Carlson.

But with Trump laying the foundations of a Fox News-inspired White House, the question is: how much of a role will the media company play in the new presidency?

“Now that he is back in office, compared to networks like NewsMax and OANN and lots of podcasts and lots of websites, it’s mainstream,” said Wendy Via, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism and an expert on far-right politics in the US. “[Fox News] will be the place that all of his cronies, all these people that he’s going to appoint or nominate, they’re gonna go and sing his praises.”

Several Fox News insiders will be at the heart of the Trump administration and tappable for influence: incoming border czar Tom Homan is a former paid contributor who declared “I love Fox” on the network hours after his appointment, while the CIA director-to-be, John Ratcliffe, has also appeared on Fox News multiple times.

“It will be Trump’s network,” said Via. “So it is going to be the sort of respected news outlet that supports every one of Trump’s antidemocratic proposals, initiatives [and] actions.”

Adding to that, controversial congressman Matt Gaetz, a firebrand for the Maga movement and a recurring face on Fox News, is Trump’s pick for attorney general.

Perhaps, or at least so far, no other Trump appointment personifies the dominance of Fox News in the new administration than the naming of Fox & Friends Weekend cohost Pete Hegseth as the future secretary of defense. Hegseth, an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran with no senior military or national security experience, takes the reins of the most powerful military in the world, which he has regularly chastised on-air as too “woke” for combat.

“Trump’s pick of Pete Hegseth as defense secretary is our best indicator yet of the value he will place on Fox News over the next four years,” said Margot Susca, an assistant professor of journalism at American University and the author of Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy. “What he’d get with a loyalist like Hegseth is none of the pushback he received in his first administration from James Mattis, a four-star general who, of course, quit after disagreement over Syria and called Trump a threat to the constitution.”

Following the election in 2020, the Biden administration did come under fire for hiring a number of MSNBC talking heads, none of whom took on positions with anywhere near the gravity of overseeing the Pentagon.

Susca pointed out the “Fox corporation is a publicly traded company, meaning its core mission is to serve shareholders, not the public at large”, and its “executives will do whatever they can to boost viewership and profits in this attention economy facing competition from outlets like OANN that tilt even further right”.

In other words, Murdoch’s global media empire, which has already reaped more than $3bn in revenue in the final quarter of 2024, very much stands to profit from its naked allegiance to Trump.

Susca continued: “When that loyalty extends to news programming, you’re likely to see a channel like Fox News become a larger megaphone for Trump’s actions rather than acting as a watchdog on administrative policies and their impacts. The biggest loser in a system like that is the public.”

During his last presidency, Trump would often call into Fox News live, bringing some of the most unprecedented access to a modern president in media history. But the news landscape since his time in office has changed dramatically. While Fox News is armed with a retinue of Trump acolytes sure to keep its relevance and ratings high, it still faces challengers.

Not only do NewsMax and OANN vie for Trump’s attention, even Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, has become one of the choice platforms for rightwing politicos and Maga types. It’s also Musk, not Murdoch, who seems poised to become one of the most singularly influential figures within Trump’s orbit; Musk already sits in on calls with world leaders and will head up the new Department of Government Efficiency.

“Musk as X owner has a powerful venue for distortions and outright lies that have the potential to shape public opinion and fuel misinformation,” said Susca. “OANN, Newsmax and X are fighting for their own share of the billion-dollar media pie in an increasingly polarized and fractured media ecosystem.”

Even so, Fox News has still become the undisputed vector for Trumpism: the “great replacement theory”, election denialism, and attacks against Trump’s Democratic rivals were and still are mainstays of its programming.

“Trump gets an unfiltered cable audience, and Fox gets a former reality television star who continuously lowers the bar with his outlandish and often unfactual statements that drives viewership,” said Susca.