Laura Ingraham went on Sean Hannity’s show on Monday to commiserate with her fellow Fox News host, who was struggling to brush aside the embarrassing revelation that he had taken legal advice from Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s beleaguered lawyer. What made the news awkward for Hannity was that he had repeatedly defended Cohen from political critique without acknowledging his relationship with the lawyer. “You’re like my brother, but I’m glad for like a millisecond the heat’s off me and on you,” said Ingraham, whose insults of Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor David Hogg sparked a boycott that led nearly 20 companies to pull their ads from her show.

The squabbles surrounding Hannity and Ingraham illustrate the paradoxical position of Fox News in the Trump era: The network is at the pinnacle of power, but that makes it more vulnerable to attacks. What’s true of Fox also applies, for different reasons, to other media outlets on the hard right, like Breitbart, and even outright conspiracy peddlers like Alex Jones’ Infowars. They have achieved unprecedented political impact, but that has brought more intense scrutiny of their journalistic integrity, along with boycotts and lawsuits.

With Trump’s presidency, Fox News has garnered a level of sway in the White House that no other media outlet has ever had. Trump is an avid viewer of the network, and often seems to base his rhetoric and policies on what he sees on the network. Trump has been known to invite Fox hosts to dinner to seek their advice and he’s made major appointments (including national security advisor John Bolton and national economics adviser Larry Kudlow) based on how those figures comported themselves on Fox.

The symbiotic relationship between Fox News and Trump has made the network uniquely consequential, but risks tying the network’s fate to the president. Fox has committed itself to a hardline defense of Trump, with hosts like Hannity and Tucker Carlson pushing with the conspiracy theory that Trump is the victim of a Deep State plot. The long-term risk for Fox is that in becoming so entangled in Trump, they could become discredited if the president goes down.

Fox faces a more immediate problem, too: losing the modicum of respect it has among its mainstream media peers. While figures like Hannity and Ingraham are frankly acknowledged to be ideological warriors, Fox also runs a news desk bound by the same rules of journalistic ethics used by its non-conservative competitors.