Fox News Exposed as Trump’s Personal Mouthpiece

During the 2016 election, Fox News’ then-CEO Roger Ailes warned owner Rupert Murdoch about the soon-to-be-president. “Trump gets great ratings,” Ailes said, “but if you’re not careful, he is going to end up totally controlling Fox News,” Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman reported in 2018.

Ailes’ warning is borne out by a new article from The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, which reveals, among other details, that Fox News knew about President Donald Trump’s relationship with pornographic film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 but the story didn’t run. Former Fox executive Ken LaCorte allegedly told reporter Diana Falzone: “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.”

Mayer lays out the long-term relationship between Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch, pointing out that Murdoch “regarded Trump with disdain, seeing him as a real-estate huckster and a shady casino operator,” but that private opinion didn’t get in the way of a professional relationship.

The two were introduced in 1976 by Roy Cohn, the lawyer and power broker who built his career as an attorney for Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Cohn, Mayer writes, “saw the potential for tabloid synergy: Trump could attain celebrity in the pages of the Post as a playboy mogul, and Murdoch could sell papers by chronicling Trump’s exploits.” Murdoch did so frequently, including in the gossip column Page Six. For his part, Trump “loves Page Six and used to have it brought it to him the moment it arrived in his office,” former Post writer Susan Mulcahy wrote in Politico.

Murdoch’s creation of Fox News in 1994, however, was even more critical for building what became Trump’s base in 2016, Mayer writes.

Ailes personally invited Trump to appear on “Fox and Friends” in 2011, when Mayer explains, he did a “trial run of his campaign tactics,” and “used the channel as a platform to exploit racist suspicions about President Barack Obama, spreading doubt about whether he was born in America.”

As a result of this practice and these connections, Mayer explains, “a direct pipeline has been established between the Oval Office and the office of Rupert Murdoch.”

Now, Fox anchor Sean Hannity has appeared on stage at Trump rallies, and as Sherman reported last year, the links among Fox contributors and the Trump administration have only grown:

The administration can feel like a Fox green room on a heavy news day. John Bolton serves as Trump’s national security adviser; former Fox contributor Ben Carson runs HUD; former ‘Fox & Friends’ newsreader Heather Nauert serves as State Department spokesperson; and former Fox President Bill Shine is deputy chief of staff for communications.

Mayer also reports that Trump has a personal ranking system for Fox News personalities on a scale from 1-10. Sean Hannity gets a 10. But he is surprisingly bested by Steve Doocy, a host of “Fox and Friends”: he gets a 12 from the president. Bret Baier, who occasionally challenges Trump, lands a 6.

Of course, there have been plenty of signs of the Fox-Trump relationship in plain sight. Trump regularly tweets about favorably about Fox’s ratings. His Instagram account is filled with reposts of Fox news reports. CNN counted and found that Fox content makes up almost a quarter of his Instagram feed. In 2017, he tweeted, “The fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred. @MSNBC & @CNN are unwatchable. @foxandfriends is great!”

“Fox News’ identity,” as Sherman wrote last year, “is now inseparable from that of the president.”

Read Mayer’s full article here.