Still, even as he was starting to fashion himself as the shadow chief of the Republican Party, Ailes made an effort to demonstrate that he had some limits. In 2010, when Hannity landed in Cincinnati to appear at a Tea Party event, Ailes ordered him to get right back on a flight home to New York. The organizers, charging admission fees, were profiting from the Fox brand, and Fox hosts were not supposed to let themselves be used that way. By the summer of 2011, Beck was out. His overwrought diatribes about George Soros and sundry leftists in the Obama administration were becoming “a branding issue,” as Ailes later explained — and, perhaps more to the point, his ratings were dropping.
With the 2012 presidential election, Fox struggled to maintain an increasingly angry — and fickle — audience. Core viewers didn’t want to believe that Obama was cruising to re-election, and Fox’s hosts and guests told them over and over that they did not have to: The polls showing an Obama victory over his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, were “skewed” by mainstream pollsters with a Democratic bias.
Ailes had long seen every election night as a chance to burnish the news division’s “fair and balanced” bona fides. “Don’t go out there looking like your puppy died,” he would say. But in 2012, viewers’ wishes and reality reached an impasse. As Obama clinched the critical state of Ohio, Karl Rove — George W. Bush’s former political adviser, now a Fox contributor — said the call was premature, keeping audience hopes alive; Megyn Kelly, a rising star from the news side, shut him down mercilessly, marching down to the Fox News decision desk, on camera, to have the team explain why in no uncertain terms Rove was wrong.
In the days that followed Obama’s re-election, Fox’s ratings fell, so much at some points that the network was trailing MSNBC in the key 25-to-54 age demographic, a focus of advertisers. As the discussion about whether and how the network had lost the trust of its audience continued, executives in the news division dropped their most strident poll denier, the political analyst Dick Morris, and sidelined Rove. But another network regular, Donald J. Trump, appeared to draw a different lesson from the election miss. The audience wanted to stay in the world Fox presented the first time.
In 2012, you could see the seeds of Trump’s 2016 victory and even the run-up to the Jan. 6 crisis. The longtime television personality knew his audience — soon to be his base — better than any Fox host, and he did not hesitate to feed it: “More reports of voting machines switching Romney votes to Obama,” Trump tweeted before voting had even ended; then afterward, “Let’s fight like hell to stop this great and disgusting injustice,” and “We can’t let this happen, we should march on Washington and stop this travesty” and “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!”
Trump, with his flagrant disregard for facts, presented every news organization with significant challenges. For Fox, the problem was even trickier. Trump had a particularly strong hold on its core audience members. Would Fox follow them down the rabbit hole? By the time he clinched the 2016 Republican nomination, they had choices. For the first time, there were other options for conservative news consumers on television — Newsmax, which Ruddy had brought to cable in 2014, and One America News Network, which made its debut in 2013. The new networks were “barely a blip,” one Fox executive would say dismissively. In the early summer of that year, Ailes came under scrutiny for serial sexual harassment and abuse at the network, which would lead to his ouster; after the Murdochs forced Ailes out that July, he became an informal political adviser to Trump. Hannity was acting as an informal adviser to Trump, too, crossing Ailes’s onetime line. Quietly, that August, the network dropped its defining slogan: “Fair and Balanced.”
