The Longer Read
Why Fox News is finally turning on ‘dictator’ Trump
Fox News has long been part of Donald Trump’s power play. But its decision to join a TV blackout of the White House suggests that the relationship between the president and the network that helped build his movement may be starting to fray. Alex Hannaford reports on who stands to lose the most
When President Donald Trump made the decision to ban CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House because of perceived negative coverage, (a move that would backfire a few days later when a judge intervened), he might not have envisaged witnessing solidarity from another network he assumed was his own natural ally.
CNN is one of five networks that constitute a rotating pool providing television coverage of the president to the media. But in order to show their objection to Trump’s decision, CBS, ABC, NBC – and, most significantly, Fox News – also decided to stop filming him. A decision which meant that earlier this week we were treated to the comical sight of Trump essentially speaking to no one as he inaugurated the new helipad on the South Lawn of the White House. With no network microphones there to capture the audio, the thunder of Marine One drowned out his words.
The news that Fox was putting itself in the line of the president’s ire has raised many eyebrows. Since launching in 1996, this was the network that Trump is known to favour. He is known to regularly call Fox live on air, and Fox has even supplied senior personnel to his administration; Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defence secretary, was a Fox News personality and co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend before joining the administration. Jeanine Pirro was also a Fox News personality until Trump named her interim United States attorney for the District of Columbia in May, 2025.
Fox’s opinion shows have provided a reliable echo chamber for the American right (in an episode of Family Guy, Lois Griffin lands a job as a Fox News reporter despite warnings from Brian that the network is politically biased; her first assignment is to create a hit piece on liberal filmmaker Michael Moore). In 2024, when the network projected Trump would win the presidency, the left was reportedly left fuming.
And so it seemed like a risky move for Fox to boycott the White House pool – particularly as the move was in support of its ideological rival CNN, which, along with the other banned networks, said it would sue the Trump administration, for violating their First Amendment rights. For now, at least, that’s unnecessary as on Thursday morning a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order and told the White House to restore the press credentials for the news outlets.
“It’s huge,” Alexandra Kitty, author of Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, told The Independent. “It’s significant that they’re breaking with Trump and saying, well, we don’t agree with this ban; I don’t think people realise how significant it is.”
Kitty calls it a “huge shift” and it was certainly not one without risk for them. Petulant Trump is notorious for going after anyone who he believes has crossed him – and in a response to the boycott the White House began promoting its own live video feed of the president, dubbing it Trump TV.
It is why, Kitty says, Trump needs Fox, not the other way round. “If he loses the backing of Fox, it’s over for him. In terms of legacy, in terms of everything.”
According to Forbes, each year since January 2002, Fox has been number one in total day and primetime viewership in America. Its most recent primetime viewing figures (from the first week in September) showed the network averaged 1.8 million viewers. In 2020 (peak election year) its average primetime audience was a little over 3 million. In 2024 it was 2.4 million.
As the New York Times wrote this week, “if the most television-addicted president in history suddenly finds the cameras missing, is he really still the president, or the kind he has been until this moment?” Trump’s entire career has been built on TV ratings. He needs the oxygen of the airwaves; starve him of that and, many believe, he will deflate before our eyes.
Kitty says the reason is simple: Fox News cultivated Trump’s base. “Fox hit upon an audience that felt totally neglected. And what they actually ended up doing was making the audience for Donald Trump who kind of walked in and said ‘oh, here’s a group of people I can pander to.’ So he actually exploited what Fox News had built over twenty years and pretty much took over.
“Fox has been there longer for this group of people than Donald Trump ever had. He kind of gave them this ticket all the way to the White House, but Fox actually identified these people who were discontented and they found them a group of people they could blame for all their problems. So this is almost like mum and dad are fighting. Whose side do you take?”
Kitty says when she was conducting research for Outfoxed, her book on Fox News, it was before Trump had turned Republican (between 2001 and 2009, Trump was a registered Democrat). “And, by 2016, Trump took advantage of this built-in audience, so it seems like it was a very good symbiotic relationship, but Trump just went off the rails.”
However, Trump has been visibly putting Fox News in a difficult position for a while. Trump has attacked popular Republican governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis (who he nicknames Ron DeSanctimonious) and Georgia’s Brian Kemp; he has criticised pro-life legislation – a bread-and-butter issue for Fox viewers; and refused to fully release the Epstein files (the law allowed for redactions to protect “classified information” and active federal investigations). Even Steve Bannon has taken issue with Trump’s handling of Epstein, saying it could damage Republicans in the midterms.
Put simply, Trump needs Fox’s MAGA base, a base Kitty describes as a vocal minority. “They’re very loud. Trump would have never entered the White House in the first place if it wasn’t for the swing votes of independents. So he has overestimated the clout of the MAGA minority and doesn’t understand that independents don’t have loyalty to any particular party.”
It is why Fox’s decision to join the boycott really matters. As the author of Apprentice in Wonderland, Ramin Setoodeh, told the New York Times: “To him this is equal to being cancelled. This is equal to having a hit show and having the networks pull it from the lineup.”
So, why is Fox prepared to rile him now? Aside from rumblings in his base, Kitty believes Rupert Murdoch, who founded Fox News along with former CEO Roger Ailes, is no stranger to playing “both sides”. Now chairman emeritus after handing over the reins to his son Lachlan, Murdoch walks a tightrope when it comes to Trump. “It’s interesting because the Wall Street Journal, which is also owned by News Corp, has often been critical of Trump. I think he [Murdoch] has made nice with Trump but he’s let his outlets report stuff that might not have been very flattering to him.”
Murdoch does this because he knows you have to meet the viewers where they are. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that Fox anchors who are strongly supportive of Trump overall have recently been questioning Trump’s handling of the Iran war; a war that many of his base don’t agree with and that is causing them real pain at the petrol pumps. In June, Fox hosts Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters openly questioned the president’s repeated assertions that the conflict was nearing an end. And former Fox stars Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly are now part of a conservative-media backlash against the administration’s Iran policy. Why? Because they know that’s where the MAGA base is.
Some Trump voters will also dislike any perceived attack on the constitutional right to free speech. Republicans have spent years making opposition to “censorship” a core political issue, particularly attacking the Biden administration.
Of course, if you listen to JD Vance, Trump’s media ban was never a ban at all. “He’s not banning media outlets,” Vance insisted this week. “He’s saying we’re not giving you special access to the White House…” It was Vance, incidentally, who said during the presidential election that censorship was the biggest threat to democracy.
So are Trump’s supporters being gaslighted? On one hand Trump says he believes in free speech; on the other, his media ban and launch of ‘Trump TV’ is straight out of a dictator’s playbook.
By joining the TV boycott, Fox signed a statement arguing that the public has a vital interest in receiving independent information about its government, and that no administration should restrict a news organisation because it objects to its reporting.
But despite the visible cracks when Trump’s administration pursues policies that directly collide with Fox’s traditional base’s positions, Kitty also thinks Trump presents a danger to the very TV network that helped him win the presidency in the first place. “Fox is in a curious position,” she says, “because his approval ratings keep going down and down and that’s eroding the audience that they spent so long building. It’s going to be very interesting to see how the midterms play out, because that is also going to be a referendum on Fox’s longevity too.”
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