For the better part of the past decade, the most powerful man in Republican politics and the most powerful institution in conservative media have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship that’s led to literally unchecked power and record revenue, respectively. The arrangement was so mutually beneficial that nobody bothered to ask who worked for whom.
On Tuesday, a senior White House official answered the question in the form of a Washington Times column, and the answer was a phone call to Fox News’s CEO that he described as angry.
The official is Peter Navarro, the convicted felon and senior White House counselor for trade, and he had a busy day. He had published the Fox Business memo that killed Maria Bartiromo‘s July segment on Trump’s China-rigged-the-election speech, the one from programming chief Ralph Giordano that says “We don’t want to do 2020 election segments at all Thurs or Friday.” He said in his op-ed that forwarding it to the White House was his duty, and that Suzanne Scott heard from the West Wing shortly after he’d sent it up the food chain. Then he told Fox News viewers they have other options, naming Newsmax and Real America’s Voice. Later that night, he appeared on Newsmax to hammer his message home.
Side note: Fox Business reports to Jay Wallace, not Scott, and Giordano sits two rungs below the woman Navarro chose to name, which reveals who he was really targeting, and it was never a memo.
I’m not going to re-run the Bartiromo tick-tock, partly because I wrote it last Thursday and partly because the interesting part was never how she ended up off the air. What I asked then was whether anyone in the Executive Branch would get the clear message Fox News was sending the White House, and that given how that building handles bad news, I wouldn’t count on it.
Well, guess what. Four days later, the message the Trump administration sent back included what they see as a shadow-ban list naming Don Jr., Rudy Giuliani, Laura Loomer, John Solomon, and Kash Patel, or in their eyes, figures from Trump world no longer booked on Fox News. Reasonable news consumers see that as a clown car of irresponsible, conspiracy-spewing buffons that have no business on a network that aims to be fact-based and calls itself a news org.
Navarro’s attack on Fox News is a time-honored tradition in the White House. Don’t love the narrative, pick a fight with a news outlet. But previous examples saw the Obama administration (Anita Dunn!) attacking Fox News over health care reform coverage, and Donald Trump attacking “Fake News CNN!” This stands out, however, as friendly fire. And it's too irresistible to ignore.
Navarro’s attack got a lot of attention for its bravado and intraparty violence, but he was aiming at an unspoken political arrangement. And given the reaction, we can now see how that arrangement has a problem it managed to hide for nine years.
With a disastrous midterm looming, Trump desperately needs to resurrect his election denialism of 2020. It’s the argument he’ll first reach for in November if the House and Senate maps go the way current political polls suggest they might. Trump’s prime time speech about China’s alleged election interference sure feels like a manufactured crisis designed to rationalize federal remediation into localized election systems. And that’s not just my take; it's almost every other newsroom's point of view as well, including Fox News, which decided to take a long, hard pass at further coverage of the details Trump claimed.
Fox News has 787.5 million reasons to want to keep 2020 election denials in its rearview mirror, because that's the cost of the Dominion settlement in April 2023. And with a potentially more costly Smartmatic case still in court, one that reportedly features Bartiromo prominently, every election fraud segment the network airs from here on is not just a potential exhibit, but also dangerously costly.
But Navarro’s own op-ed makes the case against him. He concedes that Sean Hannity carried the speech live and gave the president five minutes after it. But here’s the craziest part of his complaint: Fox News was the only network that aired the entire address! ABC, NBC, and CNN skipped it and later aired clips, and CBS joined late and left early. It bears repeating because Navarro’s complaint is so daft. The network he’s accusing of suppression is the only one that ran the whole thing. The mutually beneficial relationship was apparent the night he made the prime-time speech in question. Trump got the airtime while Fox News got the ratings because it was the only place to watch it.
What Fox News refused to do is give meaningful coverage to specious claims afterward. Airing a presidential speech is one thing, but turning his 2020 story into a programming franchise is what the lawyers are paid to prevent, and in this case, the lawyers won.
But Peter Navarro certainly knows all this, which is why he reached for the Newsmax threat. I get why, because the last time that play ran, it worked. In November 2020, Fox News called Arizona for Biden, Trump went to war with the network, and the audience walked to Newsmax in numbers that temporarily dropped Fox News to third place in Jan 21 ratings and rattled executives. It remains the one time in a decade Trump actually hurt Fox News, and a month ago I wrote that it sure felt like he owned the audience and the network was just holding it for him.
Except look at what each punishment cost. The audience came back within months. The lawsuit took another two and a half years and three-quarters of a billion dollars, and the second one is still going. Fox News learned from 2020 that viewers can wander off for a while, but that lawyers will follow you for years. Navarro is trying to scare the network with the first lesson, while Fox News is clearly operating in fear of the second.
Which brings us to what Fox News did about one of the most direct attacks any White House has made on it, which was nothing at all. Fox News never discusses these sorts of matters publicly, and they were certainly never going to say anything about this now, either via statement or on air. To me, that reveals who really holds the power in this dynamic. Trump and his White House would love nothing more than a distracting and theatrical fight with Fox News. The network, on the other hand, knows far better than to take the bait, and their ratings will not only not suffer, but likely improve as a result.
Years ago, while working at iHeartRadio, Funkmaster Flex went after my boss on air, and my boss said nothing, and when I asked why, I was told never to get in a fight with the guy holding the microphone. Navarro sided with a conservative outlet with a much smaller microphone (a micromicrophone?), and the big one stayed off. Fox News doesn’t have to win an argument with the White House when it owns the pipe the argument has to travel through, and this week it left the dispute on the loading dock.
I suspect this failed dust-up will quickly move on, but larger questions remain about White House leadership. Namely, what the fuck is Susie Wiles thinking by not reigning Navarro in and keeping the stark raving lunatic off public airwaves that is doing more harm than good. To wit: there is one network taking Trump’s goofy-assed RNC midterm convention gavel to gavel, and it’s the network that Navarro just attacked publicly? Not a smart move at all.
The Trump administration wanted a fight so badly that it blasted its CEO, published an internal memo, accused the network of betraying MAGA, and pointed its viewers toward the competition? Fox News’s response was to keep acting as if none of it had happened.
Navarro seems to have entirely missed that Fox News has far more power than any other media outlet in terms of amplifying or ignoring White House narratives. The dumbest fight the White House could ever pick is with Fox News.