Lachlan Murdoch Sends Surprising Signal of Fox News’ Future Editorial Direction: ‘We Don’t Need to Go Further Right’
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Today was a rather significant day in the history of Fox News, and not just because CEO Suzanne Scott signed a multi-year agreement to stay on as leader of the cable news giant. In an earnings call that followed that announcement, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch offered insights on how he felt Fox News could best return to the ratings dominance that has marked the past two decades.
For some crucial context, one needs to first recognize that while all media outlets have struggled to figure out how best to draw viewers in a post-Trump era, no outlet has been hit harder than Fox News. The month of January was a relative mess for a variety of reasons, from poor ratings to a serious lawsuit.
The network has been losing to CNN, a rare feat in cable news, in part thanks to its coverage of the 2020 election which prompted many Trump supporters to seek out more right-wing outlets. Some Fox hosts, however, remained loyal to the president, backing his false claims about the election. The conspiratorial coverage from hosts like Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs landed Fox News with a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit from Smartmatic.
While ratings show signs of normalizing, there have been breathless—and it appears, false—reports questioning whether current network leadership would weather this storm. It worth noting that, post-inauguration, CNN has on my days dropped to third in the ratings.
Rupert Murdoch signaled support for Scott and network president Jay Wallace in an email reported by The Washington Post. But Lachlan Murdoch’s comments—and his specific assessment of the current cable news ecosystem — are far more revealing about the future of cable news and perhaps national political discourse for the coming years.
“We believe where we’re targeted—to the center-right—is exactly where we should be targeted,” said Murdoch, responding to a question about the future editorial direction of Fox News on the earnings call. “It’s where we’ve been.”
He then seemed to address speculation that the cable news outlet will turn further right to attract viewers lost to smaller and fringe outlets like Newsmax and OAN in the wake of the 2020 election.
“We don’t need to go further right. We don’t believe America is further right,” he said. “And we’re obviously not going to pivot left. All of our significant competitors are to the far left. So we’ll stick where we are.”
Murdoch explained that they expected a downturn in viewership and revealed some impressive fluency with the competitive ratings landscape. “We’re down about 13 percent in ratings,” he admitted, before noting that roughly four years ago after the Trump-Clinton election both CNN and MSNBC were down in the ratings by similar percentages.
“So this is a cycle that we’ve seen before. It’s a cycle we expected. We look forward to the news normalizing, and, you know, we will go on from strength to strength.”
One could argue that some Fox News hosts and contributors played a dangerous game of footsie with conspiratorial fringes amplified by Donald Trump and his surrogates over the past year or so. So Murdoch’s assessment that there will be a return to the center-right portion of the political spectrum is good news for those who see the extreme ends as pernicious.
There are a number of reasons for Fox News’s recent dive in the ratings, not least of which is message fatigue, as well as the repeated promotion of the “stolen election” lie by outlets like OAN and Newsmax, which bit off a sizable chunk of the Fox audience. But that ship has, thankfully, has largely set sail.
Now that President Joe Biden is in the White House, Fox News can return to its natural state as an oppositional opinion outlet to Democrat Party institution. Lest we forget, that a pro-Republican voice is very much in the conservative network’s DNA, as it was a stated goal from founder Roger Ailes. So despite Fox News’s recent challenges, they may be better positioned than their competitors to bounce back from a post-Trump media lull.
Viewers of Fox News over the past few months might be surprised to hear from Lachlan Murdoch that Fox News is not pivoting hard right, as a number of programming decisions have suggested otherwise. Conservative firebrand Greg Gutfeld is rumored to be getting his late-night own show; Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo appears a favorite to host the network’s new 7 p.m. opinion show (though this is just idle speculation.) Commentators like Ben Domenech, founder of the ardently pro-Trump website The Federalist, have formally joined the Fox News team. Skeptics might see these potential moves as a strange definition of “center-right.”
At the same time, the more moderate or centrist conservative voices like Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes barely get much airtime compared to their near-ubiquitous presence during the Obama years. It is good news for those wanting a healthy political discourse to hear that Fox News wants to solidify its center-right role — adding some more moderate voices to their stable of pundits would achieve that.
Fox News has become forever synonymous with its conservative viewership, so the notion of retooling the iron-clad right-of-center brand as anything other than what it has always been is almost impossible to get one’s head around.
The network wants to return to its center-right core identity, a retooling that can only come at the cost of amplifying dangerous conspiracies.
All things considered, that should be viewed as very welcome news to anyone who works in or consumes news, regardless of political beliefs.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
