A Trump candidacy is the logical conclusion of what Fox News spent nearly 20 years sowing in rightwing politics – but it is tearing the network in two

The winner of the third and final debate by nearly all measures was Fox News’s Chris Wallace, whose work as moderator drew immediate praise from fellow journalists for its lack of partisanship. But Wallace’s performance will not be enough to salve the wounds inflicted in this horrible election.

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Fox News had the best start to the election season of any television network – and then the trouble started. Megyn Kelly, its star anchor, lit into Trump in August 2015 over the candidate’s insulting remarks about women; Trump responded with graphic insults directed at Kelly herself.

Then came the ousting of Fox’s founder, chairman and auteur Roger Ailes, who left the network in disgrace in July amid a series of allegations of sexual misconduct – charges he still vehemently denies.



Fox’s commentators have always represented the breadth of American conservatism; since Ailes’s departure, the network’s airwaves have become the battlefield in a war over the future of the Republican party.

Trump, a candidate whose positions are said to closely reflect Ailes’s own views, has made the network ground zero for the fight among conservatives that could have profound consequences for the network. Watch the network’s show The Five for regular examples: host Greg Gutfeld observed early this year that all was not well. “What we’re doing [on The Five] is pointing out this fractured strife among the Republican party, but us pointing that out is like Charlie Sheen pointing out your drug habit.”

The chaos of it can be surreal: as soon as the final debate ended, Charles Krauthammer called Trump’s public questioning of the electoral process “political suicide”; hours later columnist Liz Peek, formerly a Trump detractor, called him “calm, informed and reasonable”. Both write from a pro-business conservative perspective.

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And even on the eve of the network’s last big moment in the spotlight, its ousted CEO continued to make headlines: Ailes and Trump have fallen out, according to a new report from Vanity Fair. Its talent are publicly squabbling over Trump himself; longtime second banana CNN is even chalking up the occasional ratings victory. What went wrong?

At first it seemed like a perfect match. As Gabriel Sherman, biographer of the network’s founder, said in an interview with the Guardian this summer, Ailes kept the disparate strands of American conservatism united under one roof even as he remade rightwing politics in his own image. And the avatar of his ideology, in many ways, is Donald Trump.

“[T]hat’s really one of Roger Ailes’s legacies: reshaping the Republican party as a populist, blue-collar, white nativist party,” Sherman said. “The Washington elites and the conservative intellectuals, because of Ailes’s power, had to kind of hold their noses and graft themselves onto it.”

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The reason this worked so well on Fox – for decades – was that it often became entertaining bloodsport: in August of last year, the network smashed records with 24m viewers tuning in to watch the network’s 10-way free-for-all between Trump and nine career politicians.

It might be a stretch to call Ailes a peacemaker, but he was adroit at calming tensions between bickering conservatives, even brokering a tense truce between Kelly and Trump. With the CEO deposed, though, the civil war within the Republican party began to spill into the ranks of the most prominent anchors and commentators on the Murdoch-run TV network. Kelly, now the network’s most prominent anchor, described commentator Sean Hannity as uncritical of Trump on her own show; Hannity took the dispute to Twitter, saying that Kelly clearly supported Clinton.

Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) @megynkelly u should be mad at @HillaryClinton Clearly you support her. And @realDonaldTrump did talk to u. https://t.co/vsQiNMgHut

Wallace said he shed tears on Ailes’s behalf when the CEO left the company. The New Republic publicly asked whether Wallace possessed the necessary objectivity to moderate the debate; the anchor, son of 60 Minutes anchor Mike Wallace, said in an interview on his network that only he, his producer and his researcher were prepping for his coverage. “It’s just the three of us against the world here.”

Wallace represented his network admirably: he demonstrated a fluency in a wide variety of conservative points of view, persistently referring to public benefits as “entitlements” and implying so heavily that Obama caused the Bush-era housing market crash that Trump thanked him for the question.

He drilled into Clinton on abortion, a topic that all but disappeared at the tail end of the election cycle but one of prime importance for a huge swath of conservative voters, and one which has completely escaped mention at the other debates. And he made headlines pushing Trump until he declared he would not necessarily accept the results of a free and democratic election.

While it may have been as “fair and balanced” as Fox gets, in the Trump-saturated media environment questions of objectivity begin to seem quaint. A single incident early this year looks more and more like a turning point: in March, Michelle Fields, a writer for rightwing site Brietbart.com, accused then campaign manager Corey Lewandowski of assault. Ben Terris, a writer for the Washington Post, confirmed her account of rough handling by Lewandowski at a campaign event.

The reaction took months to unfold, but it is remarkable: Fields, with a friend, Ben Shapiro, left Brietbart – the site had become suddenly flush with Trump-loving readers and preferred to abandon its writer while it became a more overt outlet for the campaign’s talking points and a less apologetic haven for white nationalists. Eventually Breitbart’s leader, Steve Bannon, managed to elbow out political operative Paul Manafort and acquire the top spot – “CEO” – of the Trump campaign.

Meanwhile, Lewandowski’s adversarial relationship with the media, whom he had penned and blacklisted, to say nothing of Fields’s charges, got him a job at CNN, where he will continue to be paid $20,000 a month by Trump beyond even the end of the campaign.

Fox, largely because of Ailes’s departure, has become the site of soul searching among a conservative establishment that has lost its way in a violent upsurge of the same populism that had helped animate it in its formative years. If the allegations of the more than 20 women uncovered by its internal investigation were true, the network had hosted multiple incidents of sexual misconduct against its own talent; that kind of conduct, James and Lachlan Murdoch made clear, could not be publicly tolerated.

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Meanwhile, CNN and other outlets were discovering that the inchoate rage of the populist right could be very good for business. Trump himself became the target of 10 accusations, so far, of sexual assault – and responded by insulting his accusers as unattractive and calling them liars.

Trump coverage has given CNN its highest ratings since the first Obama campaign and, crucially, even a smattering of ratings victories over Fox, which has dominated its competition for more than a decade. There are even persistent rumors of a “Trump TV” network – a near impossibility in the current TV economy, but one Trump himself teased on Wednesday by livestreaming the debate on Facebook with the hashtag #trumptv.

Likewise, Breitbart, the Federalist and conspiracist Alex Jones’s Infowars have suddenly entered the mainstream. At Fox, similar voices to those were all represented at one time or another – Ailes famously reprimanded staff for “shooting in the tent” when concerns were raised internally over controversial commentator Glenn Beck, who eventually left the network amid acrimony.

This isn’t to say that Fox is on its last legs – it’s still a fabulously profitable enterprise. But it is grappling with the consequences of a political environment it did so much to create.