During the Republican primary contest, Donald Trump feuded frequently with Fox News, going after Megyn Kelly and, at the height of his pique, even skipping one of the network’s debates. That now seems like eons ago. When staunch Trump supporter Laura Ingraham launched her new 10 p.m. show last week, it represented a capstone in the yearlong remaking of Fox News in Trump’s image.

It also signaled that Fox fears increasing competition on its right flank.


The network’s new prime-time lineup, featuring Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, who was added in April, forms a three-hour nightly block of solid Trump cheerleading. Factor in the Trump-friendly morning show, “Fox & Friends,” on from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m., and during the network’s most-watched hours, seldom is heard a discouraging Trump word.

“I’ve read the stories about how the Murdochs have soured on Donald Trump, but you would not know it from their programming decisions,” said Charlie Sykes, the longtime conservative radio host and MSNBC contributor. “It certainly reflects the business model of conservative media right now. Pro-Trump viewers want a safe space. They want a reliable outlet that will defend the president and attack his critics, and Fox has apparently decided that it’s going to give them that.”

As if to drive the point home, Fox News made waves over the weekend by pulling from its air an ad calling for the president’s impeachment. Networks typically run ads of all political stripes, regardless of ideology, but the 60-second impeachment spot, funded by liberal billionaire Tom Steyer, proved too offensive to too many of the network’s viewers. “Due to the strong negative reaction to their ad by our viewers, we could not in good conscience take their money,” Jack Abernethy, co-president of Fox News, said in a statement.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday, Fox hosts uniformly downplayed the idea that Trump was a factor in the Democratic victories in Virginia and New Jersey, taking pains to drive home the president’s assertion that Virginia GOP gubernatorial nominee Ed Gillespie had erred in not embracing him closely enough.

Chris Ruddy, CEO of rival conservative platform Newsmax and a Trump ally, said even he has been taken aback by Fox hosts’ unwillingness to criticize the president. If Fox has shifted to protect itself on the right, Ruddy believes there’s now an opening for a conservative outlet that feels less reflexively defensive of Trump.

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“Newsmax is very supportive of the president, but we also will publish things that are critical of him time to time,” Ruddy said. “Fox seems to have decided to become very closely aligned, which seems unnatural, and it doesn’t seem consistent.

“It’s just bizarre, and I think they lose their credibility as a news organization,” he continued.

Fox News declined additional comment for this story.

Though Fox News remains tops in the ratings, competition is swirling around the network. The conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group is working to complete a $3.9 billion takeover of Tribune Broadcasting, which would allow its free broadcasts to reach 72 percent of U.S. households. Ruddy’s Newsmax TV currently has nowhere near Fox’s reach, but it is also looking to grow. POLITICO has reported that Newsmax recently signed a deal with Dish Network to increase its distribution.

And Ruddy was scheduled to meet with Bill O’Reilly this week in New York to discuss a potential spot on the network. Rumors have also linked O’Reilly and Sinclair, though its CEO and president, Chris Ripley, has denied any interest.

Beyond the TV world, there are a host of sites — starting with Breitbart — that threaten Fox News’ primacy over discourse on the right.

“There’s a lot of conservative media out there,” said Joseph Bonner, a senior analyst for communications and technology at Argus Research. “If Fox thinks the threat is from the right or the Trumpists, however you want to put it, to inoculate against that threat, you want to have that point of view.”

Less than a year ago, the Fox News prime-time lineup featured O’Reilly and Kelly, in addition to the ardently pro-Trump Sean Hannity. While neither O’Reilly nor Kelly’s shows were exactly bastions of liberal politics, Kelly famously took on Trump. And though a Trump supporter, O’Reilly, who was forced out of Fox News in April in the wake of multiple sexual harassment allegations, occasionally showed willingness to buck the Trump line. Their replacements, Ingraham and Carlson, almost never break from the president.

The week before starting her show, Ingraham appeared with Steve Bannon at a political rally for Kelli Ward, the hard-right Arizona Senate candidate who had been challenging Trump critic Jeff Flake — a seemingly naked declaration that Ingraham is more a political operative than a journalist.

“It’s quite a significant pivot. For people who believe Fox has always been pro-Trump, they miss the significance of how hard the shift has been in the last 18 months,” Sykes said. “Fox is really turning itself very self-consciously into virtually a house organ of the Trump administration.”

Particularly noteworthy, he said, was the network’s recent embrace of Hillary Clinton-related stories that seem designed to deflect attention from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

President Donald Trump butted heads frequently with Megyn Kelly (center) during the Republican primary contest. Kelly is pictured with Chris Wallace (left) and Bret Baier before the three moderated a 2016 Republican presidential primary debate in Des Moines, Iowa. | Charlie Neibergall/AP Photo

“There’s nothing about conservative ideas. This is not about the size of government, this is not about tax cuts. This is about defending the regime against legal attack,” Sykes said.

Some Fox News anchors, like Shepard Smith, Bret Baier and Chris Wallace, have remained willing to sound discordant notes, and Fox has added additional news programming since the election, including a just-launched newscast at 11 p.m. But the Clinton-focused stories have found significant airtime during Fox’s news programming, as well — far more than on any other network.

In the past, Fox News, under Roger Ailes, had sought to lead its viewers ideologically. The network, for instance, was on the forward edge of promoting the tea party movement during Barack Obama’s first term as president. Now, though, Ailes is gone and Fox appears more focused on meeting its viewers where they are.

That is, in part, because the network faces a far different media ecosystem today. In the old days, Fox was free to set the agenda. But the explosion in popularity of both social media and conservative sites like Breitbart, Infowars and The Gateway Pundit have now forced the network to make sure it doesn’t get left behind by whatever is bubbling up online.

“I think that Fox is making the same decision that Trump himself is making, which is double down in your appeal to your hard-core base,” Sykes said. “They didn’t hire Laura Ingraham because they want to get viewers from MSNBC.”

The access provided by cozying up to Trump — Fox’s No. 1 viewer — has been a boon to the network, said Brian Wieser, a senior analyst at Pivotal Research. Since he took office, Trump has granted 19 interviews to Fox News or Fox Business Network, compared with just two for NBC and MSNBC, one for ABC News, one for CBS News and zero for CNN.

“They’ve certainly found that they can have Trump’s ear,” he said. “They know there’s advantage to access. I suspect that’s the more important element than is sheer ideology.”

After Ingraham, whose name had previously surfaced as a potential Trump press secretary, interviewed the president on Nov. 2, The Washington Post described the interview as “as obliging as would be expected of someone who previously contemplated a role as the president's official mouthpiece.”

Trump’s appearance on Ingraham’s show caused a significant spike in her ratings, with more than 3 million people tuning in, according to Nielsen, compared with 2.36 million the night before.

Eric and Lara Trump leave the Fox Studios in New York after taping a segment of "Justice With Judge Jeanine" in October. | Andres Kudacki/AP Photo

Whether a conservative challenger could potentially dent Fox News remains an open question. Wieser said that doing so would be incredibly difficult, requiring “hundreds of millions of dollars in upfront capital commitments.”

“I look at the ratings on a regular basis, and clearly Fox is doing outrageously well,” said Charles Herring, president of the Fox rival One America Network’s parent company, Herring Networks. “I do believe that anybody who’s trying to compete with them has an uphill battle, but we’ve been able to carve out a really nice audience of independents and right-wing individuals, and we believe there’s a lot of upside potential for growth.”

Herring believes that Fox News viewers could react negatively to the network’s daytime news programs not having the same hard-core pro-Trump viewpoint as the prime-time opinion lineup. “If you’re a viewer, you’re getting two different messages, depending if you’re watching during the day or the evening prime-time lineup. And I think that’s a really tough act for a channel to do, to try to appeal to two audiences,” he said.

Though it’s unlikely a conservative challenger could immediately come along and knock Fox News off its pedestal, if another outlet grabbed even enough viewers to allow surging MSNBC to sneak ahead of Fox in the ratings, it would be a blow to the network, which has long made its No. 1 status central to its branding.

“It’s cable television. Bragging rights are relevant,” Bonner, the analyst, said.

Ruddy said Fox’s success is proof that there’s plenty of room in the conservative market, especially for a network more willing to offer “constructive criticism” of Trump.

“My view is we’re not challenging Fox, we’re just adding to the diversity of the marketplace,” Ruddy said. “Tucker, Laura and Hannity, that’s going to be a very predictable lineup, largely. My view would be more independent voices. I think in the long run this is better for conservatives, it’s better for President Trump.”

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to clarify the name of the Fox Business Network.