Meanwhile back at the ranch...
For years, Fox News executives and hosts cultivated a close relationship with Donald Trump. But after he lost the 2020 presidential election and turned his back on the network — inspiring many once-loyal viewers to do the same — the relationship curdled.
And the ensuing pressure caused tension, second-guessing and infighting within Fox on the scale of an “existential crisis,” as one senior executive called it, a cache of internal communications released Tuesday as part of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit indicates.
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” prime-time host Tucker Carlson texted a colleague on Jan. 4, 2021. “I truly can’t wait.”
Carlson, who had shared private meetings with the president and defended him on-air, added in a text:
“I hate him passionately. … What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”
Not long after Murdoch agonized over whether his hosts had “gone too far,” one of the most high-ranking news editors, Bill Sammon, texted a colleague: “In my 22 years affiliated with Fox, this is the closest thing I’ve seen to an existential crisis — at least journalistically.” The “crisis” was the network’s continued focus on what Sammon called “supposed election fraud.”
His colleague Chris Stirewalt, then a politics editor who played a key role in Fox’s decision to call Arizona for Biden, replied:
“What I see us doing is losing the silent majority of viewers as we chase the nuts off a cliff.” (Both Sammon and Stirewalt were later pushed out of their jobs at Fox.)
Carlson, in his text exchange with a colleague, expressed his ultimate frustration with Trump’s administration.
“We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest,” he wrote. “But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”
https://wapo.st/3JnnQT7
