It appears that President Donald Trump is losing one of his biggest promoters: right-wing media owner Rupert Murdoch.
The reckoning has already begun, explained Status’ “Power Lines” with veteran journalists Oliver Darcy and Jon Passantino. Darcy said that both the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, owned by Murdoch, are explicitly calling on Republicans to look beyond Trump after the shellacking on Nov. 3.
The men connect the Murdoch shift to Fox News’s declining audience. They noted that Fox News lost roughly a third of its viewers in October compared with the previous year. Their argument is that a divided Republican coalition creates a ratings problem. While loyal Trump supporters want favorable coverage, disillusioned conservatives increasingly gravitate toward independent personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who are willing to lash out at Trump when he’s wrong.
They agreed that Murdoch, a shrewd businessman, is looking at the actual data for his network and the online readership.
“Rupert’s looking at the cold, hard data and knowing that the audience wants this and is now calling on the Republican Party to just basically throw Trump overboard, ignore him, and let’s figure out where to go now,” said Darcy.
It’s also politically convenient, he added. By jumping on the anti-Trump bandwagon, now that he’s no longer good for ratings, Murdoch can throw Trump overboard for financial reasons.
Trump called into Fox News on Tuesday night to lash out at the hosts for reporting his failed polling. According to Trump, he has a 99 percent approval rating with Republican voters and that should be enough to carry his polling. Bret Baier told Trump correctly that the Fox polls he loves to rail about were accurate on election night. Fox polls tend to be close to accurate.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Trump said, passing over the reality.
“There was a blue wave forming and we’ve seen in other reporting this week that the White House and Donald Trump, these people were all acutely aware of what was going on in the country and could not figure out what to do and that’s obviously because in many ways MAGA was p—– just like the rest of the country about the war and the price and the cost of living,” said Passantino.
Darcy told Miurdoch, “he should also look in the mirror” when it comes to the election loss. According to Tucker Carlson, if Fox hadn’t been so pro-Iran war, chances are Trump likely wouldn’t have gone to war.
“So, he gets involved in a foreign war, prices skyrocket, and while obviously Donald Trump is the commander-in-chief, he’s the one who made the decision to do this,” Darcy said. “He was very much prodded along and encouraged by a lot of voices at Fox News. Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and others were itching for Donald Trump to attack Iran. And so when Tucker says, you know, that Fox deserves some of the blame, I think — he’s actually spot-on there.”
The Murdochs could very easily have told the team at Fox to dial down the war talk if he’d wanted to.
“So, I think there’s a little bit of blame that Rupert Murdoch should absorb as well here,” said Darcy.
Passantino agreed, saying Trump was “a little high on his own supply” because Fox News told him what to think.
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