Fox News has lasted through “multiple presidents, and they’re going to be around for multiple more,” said one right-wing media executive.
Presidents come and go. Rupert Murdoch remains. For those who wondered how Mr. Murdoch, the octogenarian media magnate with a conservative streak, would react to the electoral defeat of President Trump, the past few days have brought a complicated answer, well-suited to the mercurial nature of Mr. Murdoch’s world. The New York Post, the Murdoch tabloid that attacked Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter before the election, splashed a beaming Mr. Biden on its Sunday cover — “IT’S JOE TIME” — and described Mr. Trump as “downcast” and misguided in his efforts to claim the election was a fraud. The Sun, Mr. Murdoch’s outpost in London, reached new heights of Fleet Street ingenuity by comparing the president’s defeated visage to a crumple of skin on the actress Famke Janssen’s kneecap. The Wall Street Journal, which had rejected The Post’s attack on Hunter Biden, has dismissed Mr. Trump’s fraud claims, and its conservative opinion page is nudging the president toward a gracious concession. Fox News — home to “Hannity” and “Fox & Friends,” instigators and nurturers of Mr. Trump’s rise — refused to retract an election night projection of a Biden win in Arizona despite intense pressure from Mr. Trump’s aides, who reached Mr. Murdoch in England to plead their case. And yet, just as a Murdoch-Trump divorce appeared to be underway, Fox News’s prime-time stars — who have operated more or less on their own since the exit of the network’s co-founder Roger Ailes — have embraced parts of Mr. Trump’s sully-the-results strategy, even knocking colleagues who have portrayed Mr. Biden, accurately, as the election’s victor. “Many people have not called Arizona,” Sean Hannity told viewers on his Monday night show, before lobbing a dagger at the Fox News decision desk: “Those that called early made a huge mistake.” Mark Levin, a right-wing radio star with a weekend Fox News show, attacked the “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace for calling Mr. Biden the clear winner. And Tucker Carlson took a not-so-veiled swipe on Monday at his Fox News colleague Neil Cavuto, who had won the hosannas of Liberal Twitter by cutting off an appearance by Mr. Trump’s press secretary and saying he could not in good conscience broadcast her fictive claims about voter fraud. “In a democracy, you cannot ignore honest questions from citizens,” Mr. Carlson said. “You can’t just cut away from coverage you don’t like.” Efforts to understand Mr. Murdoch’s media universe are often compared to Kremlinology. But former and current associates of Mr. Murdoch said that his response to Mr. Trump’s loss could be summed up by another Cold War term: realpolitik.
