The Story:
Fox News, part of the Murdoch publishing empire, has long been considered friendly to Donald Trump — first as a candidate and later as a President. Now, though, the times may be a-changing.
Background:
Just four days after his inauguration, President Trump took time off from mastering his new duties to tweet congratulations to Fox News for having gotten the highest television ratings in its coverage of inauguration events. Fox ratings, he said, were “many times higher” than CNN’s, because the “public is smart.” Since then (January 24, 2017) there has been a lot of mutual admiration between POTUS and Fox.
On August 28, 2019, though, the President tweeted about Fox with a very different tone. He wrote, “The News @FoxNews is letting millions of GREAT people down! We have to start looking for a new news outlet. Fox isn’t working for us anymore!” This prompted responses from various Fox personalities along the lines of, “we aren’t supposed to work for him — we cover him.”
The Thing to Know:
It may be one sign of the shift in the winds at Fox that one of the most staunchly pro-Trump commentators there, Judge Jeanine Pirro, was briefly suspended from the air in March of this year, for a blatantly anti-Moslem comment. More recently, (September 3) Pirro complained to the host of a webcast that Fox might fire her, “You know I’m worried that that suspension was the basis to tee up for anything I’m doing wrong, they’ll fire me.”