Murdoch v Trump: Fox and The Hair

Murdoch v Trump: Fox and The Hair

original article by Matthew Garrahan and Demetri Sevastopulo, Financial Times
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Megyn Kelly and Donald Trump

In a fresh sign that the 2016 Republican primary race has entered uncharted territory, Michael Moore, the campaigning leftwing film-maker, appeared on Fox News Channel this week to sing the praises of one of its presenters.

Mr Moore has clashed bitterly with Fox News hosts for years but found himself aligned with Megyn Kelly — arguably the network’s biggest star — over her refusal to be cowed by Donald Trump. The GOP frontrunner has pulled out of Thursday’s Republican debate, which will be screened on Fox News, after he accused Ms Kelly of bias and called for her removal.

Fox News rejected Mr Trump’s demands and is standing by Ms Kelly. Appearing on her show, Mr Moore said she had “done something that Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, [Marco] Rubio, [Ted] Cruz, none of them have been able to do . . . which is to essentially frighten him, make him run, shut him down. Everybody has been trying to do this for months. But you did it.”

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is America’s most watched cable news channel, trouncing CNN, its main rival, in the ratings for more than a decade. With an audience that skews heavily Republican — about 60 per cent of its viewers are self-described conservatives, according to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Centre — it would have once been unthinkable that a candidate could win the GOP presidential nomination while waging a feud with the network.

But in a campaign that has upended conventional wisdom, normal rules no longer apply. The spat — dating back to August — does not seem to be hurting the Trump campaign — or Fox News itself, which has scored bumper ratings with its coverage of the primary race.

The channel is the home of vocal rightwing commentators such as Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, on whose show Mr Trump agreed to appear on Wednesday evening after boycotting the debate. But Roger Ailes, the former Nixon aide who created Fox News in 1996 — and who has run it ever since — is known to bristle when journalists and other pundits refer to it as a conservative network.

In Off Camera , a book about Mr Ailes by the writer Zev Chafets, the Fox News chairman said the network was not “programming to conservatives” but instead “not eliminating their point of view”.

The row with the GOP frontrunner arguably lends weight to the notion that Fox News is politically neutral but James Baughman, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says this would not have factored in Mr Ailes’ decision.

“I doubt he thought: ‘What a marketing coup’ [because] doing this might actually hurt Fox among their core conservative viewership,” Mr Baughman says. “This is about Ailes and Fox saying: ‘We’re going to hold our ground’.”

Mr Trump’s focus on Ms Kelly, triggered by a question she asked him at a GOP debate last summer about his views of women, has coincided with her emergence as the face of the network. Fox News said Mr Trump had “viciously attacked” Ms Kelly since August, saying it would not “give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees”.

Mr Trump upped the ante in a tweet to his 5.8m followers, saying the network’s statement was “a disgrace to good broadcasting and journalism. Who would ever say something so nasty & dumb”.

Mr Murdoch in turn tweeted a message of encouragement for Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, who is weighing whether to enter the presidential race.

“This is Bloomberg’s last chance. You never know until your hat is in the ring! Events change everything, especially during elections,” he tweeted.

The spat with Fox News fits the broader pattern of the Trump campaign, which has seen the brash billionaire challenge all parts of the Republican establishment, from the media outlets traditionally courted by candidates to wealthy GOP donors such as Sheldon Adelson, the casino tycoon who was the single biggest donor to Republicans in the 2012 election.

But with the Iowa caucuses just five days away, Mr Trump has become the pivotal figure in a big brawl within the conservative movement over whether he is a genuine conservative, or simply a canny politician wearing the veneer of an anti-politician that is duping most of the Republican base.

That ugliest fight is with Ted Cruz, the firebrand Texas senator who claims the mantle of the true social conservative among the leading contenders and paints Mr Trump as a fake. Over the past two weeks, Mr Cruz and his proxies have ramped up attacks on the property mogul.

While Mr Trump has reserved his harshest criticism of the media for Ms Kelly, the brash tycoon has made attacks on reporters a central plank of his stump speech on the campaign trail. From Iowa and New Hampshire and beyond, Mr Trump has pilloried the journalists covering his rallies and then watched as his campaign has thrived on the media attention sparked by his remarks.

At a recent rally in Ames, Iowa, Mr Trump mocked the roughly 100 journalists in the room who were waiting for him to introduce Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee who herself had a famously contentious relationship with the press. “Look at all the press back there. They must think that there is a big event going to happen today. Wow . . . this is like the academy awards” he said to loud applause.

But in this most unusual of campaigns, he may have met his match in the form of Ms Kelly and the pugnacious Mr Ailes. “Roger is the only news chief with the guts to stand up to Trump and not allow Fox’s journalism to be compromised in order to appease him,” said a person close to Fox News. “Trump was looking for an escape hatch for this debate and he’s using Megyn Kelly as the excuse.”