Donald
Trump’s disgust for Fox News has reached the point that he has decided
not to give the conservative-leaning channel any more interviews for the
time being.
The
Republican presidential frontrunner has been known to make noise when
he feels Fox News has given him the shaft — this week is no exception.
“@FoxNews
has been treating me very unfairly & I have therefore decided that I
won’t be doing any more Fox shows for the foreseeable future,” he tweeted Wednesday afternoon.
Mere hours later, the Trump campaign released a statement saying that he stands by his comments.
“As
a candidate for president of the United States and the definitive
frontrunner in every poll, both nationally and statewide, including the
just released poll in the state of Florida, Mr. Trump expects to be
treated fairly,” the statement reads. “All you have to do is look at the
tremendous ratings last night from ‘The Late Show With Stephen
Colbert,’ where Mr. Trump was the guest, or the ratings from both
debates, to fully understand the facts.”
Shortly
after, a Fox News spokesperson said that Trump’s “boycott” was a direct
response to the channel canceling his scheduled appearance on “The
O’Reilly Factor” Thursday.
“When
coverage doesn’t go his way, he engages in personal attacks on our
anchors and hosts, which has grown stale and tiresome,” the spokesperson
said. “He doesn’t seem to grasp that candidates telling journalists
what to ask is not how the media works in this country.”
The
on-again, off-again feud started when Trump took issue with Fox News
anchor Megyn Kelly’s line of questioning at the first GOP primetime
debate in early August.
Trump’s
disgust with the network sprang back to life Monday night as he
live-tweeted throughout Bill O'Reilly’s and Kelly’s programs at 8 and 9
respectively.
Trump,
who said he was “having a really hard time” watching Fox News, accused
“The O'Reilly Factor” of being “very negative” to him and refusing to
publish polls that show him dominating the GOP primary.
In
a tweet to the show, Trump wrote, “why don’t you have some
knowledgeable talking heads on your show for a change, instead of the
same old Trump-haters. The real estate magnate also suggested that Kelly should take another 11-day “unscheduled” vacation.
“Do
you ever notice that lightweight @megynkelly constantly goes after me
but when I hit back it is totally sexist. She is highly overrated!”
Trump said.
Trump
retweeted dozens of his supporters who called O'Reilly’s guests “spoon-
fed morons” and pro-Bush RINOs (Republican in Name Only), and attacked
Kelly for criticizing the Republican frontrunner.
But
the businessman’s anger is not reserved exclusively for Fox News. He
also took issue with CNN’s handling of the second primetime GOP debate,
held earlier this month.
“I wasn’t treated fairly by CNN,” Trump said to New York Magazine.
“And it shouldn’t have been three hours long. It was too long. I can’t
imagine anyone enjoying watching three hours of a debate.”
But plenty of people tuned in, largely because of Trump’s Midas touch when it comes to ratings.
Are there any Fox News hosts so obsequious towards Trump that they might dial him up and beg him to come back, like Johnny Fontane pleading with the Godfather to help him get that part he always wanted? Seems hard to imagine for most of them. Emphasis on “most.”
One reason there likely won’t be peace in our time is that Trump still has not gotten over Kelly’s questioning of him during the opening Republican primary debate. “She caused me a lot of damage, didn’t she?” Trump recently vented to a friend. “He’s really angry,” a source explained…That theory about Trump’s strategy would be more plausible if he hadn’t attacked Kelly with that nasty bit about bleeding out of her whatever, which was bound to create sympathy for her among her colleagues. I think the real strategy here is straightforward: Boycott Fox and cast them in the role of Republican establishment villain, a bad place to be for a network that presumes to cater to the Republican man on the street. Even if Fox’s ratings don’t begin to dive right now, the seeds will have been planted among pro-Trump viewers that Fox can’t be trusted. Eroding their populist credibility among their viewer base is a process and he’s trying to move that process along.
Both sides are posturing to save face. Yesterday a Fox statement called Trump’s boycott “stale and tiresome.” But a source close to the Trump campaign told me that Trump thinks he has the leverage. Trump has been hearing from Fox hosts who are worried that his boycott will hurt ratings. The calculus seems to be that by shunning Fox, Trump is hoping to drive a wedge between Fox hosts, Kelly, and Ailes. That may be wishful thinking. As an Ailes friend told me today: “Roger can’t turn back. The entire credibility of Fox as powerbroker rests on Trump being destroyed.”
This bit from Breitbart seems plausible too:
An individual with knowledge of these matters told Breitbart News that Ailes is “furious” at Lowry for saying on Megyn Kelly’s program The Kelly File on Wednesday that former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina “cut [Trump’s] balls off with the precision of a surgeon, and he knows it, he knows it.”On the one hand, that lends a bit of credence to Sherman’s theory about the wedge that Trump is supposedly trying to drive between Kelly and the rest of the Fox universe. Colleagues who sympathized with her over the “bleeding” remark might not be as sympathetic now that her show was used by Lowry to throw a scatological insult back at Trump. It’s one thing for Fox to cover him unsparingly, it’s another thing to deliberately antagonize him. On the other hand, that supports my theory too that Trump’s true aim mainly is to hurt Fox’s credibility with its populist viewers. The litmus test for whether a media outlet is “establishment” is whether it’s treating him “unfairly,” whatever that means. Lowry’s comment about Fiorina cutting his balls off is something that a viewer who’s not sure about his critique of Fox could point to as proof that Trump’s right and that they really are out to get him. It’s unimaginable that the same sort of “balls” taunt would be aimed by a guest at, say, Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. So now Ailes needs to make a big show about entertaining Trump’s grievances in order to show his fans among the Fox viewership that he’s taking their concerns seriously.
Ailes is mad at Lowry because this move means, in the ongoing war between Fox News and Trump, Fox News has now “given up the moral high ground.” Essentially, Ailes understands, that means his network looks like the unfair aggressor that Trump has accused it of being—rather than a neutral arbiter of the news—all while Trump continues soaring in the 2016 GOP primary polls.
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