PLOT TWIST: Fox News Is Flexing Its Political Independence as Trump’s Polls Nosedive
Fox News is more politically independent than its reputation suggests, even when its biggest stars lean hard right.
A Fox News poll in Texas delivered some uncomfortable numbers for Republicans this week. Democrat James Talarico led Ken Paxton 51–48, while nearly a quarter of non-MAGA Republicans said they were open to backing Talarico.
Sean Hannity challenged the findings on air, which made for a useful glimpse inside the network: Fox’s polling operation was producing one picture of the race while one of its most prominent conservative hosts was arguing for another. Both existed comfortably under the same roof. That kind of political independence inside Fox News is more common than its critics tend to acknowledge.
As I went through the last week of transcripts, variations of this dynamic kept turning up. Fox News has a clear mission in appealing to right-of-center viewers, and its primetime stars clearly want Republicans to win. It’s why its viewers tune in in droves, as the majority of its audience overwhelmingly votes Republican. Shocker: the top-rated network’s coverage reflects those interests. But the idea that this makes Fox News a single political organism, with everyone marching behind the same Republican message, doesn’t hold up particularly well when you spend enough time watching it.
Larry Kudlow provided a perfect example Wednesday when Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville joined him on Fox Business. Kudlow ran Donald Trump‘s National Economic Council and is about as far from a hostile interviewer as Tuberville could reasonably expect. But he spent much of the interview telling him that Republicans were blowing it.
“The socialists are winning, they’re taking over the Democratic Party, the Republicans are doing nothing,” Kudlow said. “The polls are lousy.” He complained that Republicans weren’t selling the economy or responding to what voters cared about and eventually unloaded on the Senate: “The U.S. Republican Senate ain’t doing a thing about it!”
Tuberville nodded along.
Earlier in the week, Fox News anchor John Roberts was pressing a guest on problems in Trump’s account of the Iran war. Trump had been offering increasingly confident versions of negotiations, the Strait of Hormuz and America’s position in the conflict while other reporting raised serious questions about depleted U.S. munitions. Roberts pointed out inconsistencies in the administration’s story, flatly suggesting that after five months of a deeply unpopular war, “we were back to square one.”
The network whose relationship with Trump is usually described almost entirely through friendly relationships with Hannity and Laura Ingraham still has an anchor willing to tell its audience when the president’s story doesn’t fit together.
The pattern extends beyond Trump. Fox News spent Thursday hammering Anthony Fauci after the Senate contempt vote, but by Friday morning Fox & Friends was reading his lawyers’ defense at length, including their accusation that Rand Paul was pursuing a personal vendetta and weaponizing the Justice Department.
The network’s fixation on Abdul El-Sayed and the DSA is far more openly political — Jesse Watters called him “The Michigan Muslim,” while Laura Ingraham has said outright that she hopes Democrats embrace the socialist left because she thinks it helps Republicans — yet even there, the coverage keeps wandering into uncomfortable territory for the GOP.
The clearest example came Friday morning from Lawrence Jones, while Fox & Friends was covering the Democratic socialist surge. Jones credited the left’s small-dollar donors and aggressive ground game, but his explanation for why it was working was much more important: they were reaching “people that are desperate right now.”
That’s a remarkable diagnosis to hear on Fox News because it cuts through months of insistence that the economy is booming and gets directly at the political problem facing Trump and Republicans. People are hurting. They’re unhappy with what they’re paying for housing, groceries and everything else, and some of them are looking elsewhere for answers. Fox News portrays El-Sayed and the DSA as villains but still acknowledges the conditions making their politics attractive. That’s a big deal.
Of course, the network still has all of its familiar ideological reflexes, and it still skips stories damaging to Republicans that its competitors cover. But across the polling desk, the White House beat, Fox Business and even Fox & Friends, there is a growing willingness to acknowledge something its audience probably already knows from its own life: the polls are bad, the war is going badly, Republicans are struggling politically and a lot of voters are hurting. That doesn’t make Fox less conservative. It makes the network more useful than the caricature of it suggests, because the people inside it are increasingly willing to describe the world as it is even when that description doesn’t flatter the people they would prefer to see win.
That is a much messier institution than the Fox News of media criticism, which tends to take the politics of its loudest hosts and apply them to the whole operation. Fox remains conservative, often aggressively so, but it is also more argumentative and politically independent than the seamless Republican propaganda machine its critics often describe.