Fox "News" is doing fine

Scandals don't seem to hurt their viewer rating, even as large national advertisers ditch the likes of Tucker Carlson and Jeanine Pirro.

Whether revenues come from luxury car ads or My Pillow, Fox News remains the top-rated and most profitable network in cable news. Fears it would not recover after the toppling of Bill O’Reilly — which was followed soon after by the ouster of longtime chief Roger Ailes in a network-wide sexual harassment scandal — have dissipated. Sean Hannity succeeded O’Reilly as the top-rated host on cable news, regularly pulling in a massive 3 million viewers a night, sometimes hitting 4 million. Carlson, who took over O’Reilly’s time slot, has started to match the numbers of his predecessor.

To the network’s critics, the reason for this continued success is obvious: ​functioning as the barely-unofficial mouthpiece of Trumpism is a lucrative business. As a former host at the network put it, “the 60 million people who voted for Trump have nowhere else to go.”

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Fox [...] takes pains ​to draw a line between its​ “anchors,”​ who deliver hard news​ (think ​Bret Baier, Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith) and​ its​ “hosts,” whose coverage is opinionated (think Hannity, Carlson and Ingraham).

It strives to establish a church-and-state divide between the reliably pro-Trump opinion programming – the network’s cash cow — and the hard news shows that Fox News uses to defend its status as a serious operation.

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Gregg Jarrett, who worked for 15 years as a Fox News anchor, was stripped of the title in 2017 and made a legal analyst, because his commentary “went off the deep end” of reporting the news, one senior network source said. The change did wonders for his career. Now free to opine on Hannity without editorial restrictions, Jarrett’s 2018 book on the “deep state” vaulted to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, demonstrating the incentives for making the move to opinion — particularly of the pro-Trump variety.

The divide is also enforced in guest booking. Seb Gorka, sources confirmed, was banned from the network’s hard news programs. The former Trump official isn’t the only one: Sara Carter, Hannity’s go-to reporter on the deep state, is also barred from the news side of Fox.

Carter appears on Hannity almost nightly to promote the reporting on her eponymous website. She is customarily introduced by Hannity as an “investigative reporter.” Fox News executives have asked Hannity to stop using this title on the grounds that Carter’s reporting is not vetted, and passes none of the network’s editorial guidelines. Hannity has responded to this feedback by repeatedly referring to Carter as an investigative reporter during her appearances. It’s hard to overstate​ how little Hannity cares about Fox News leadership, with which he rarely interacts.

And they’re perfectly content to leave him and his $35 million contract alone. One of the prevailing dynamics that has settled in as Fox News entered its post-Ailes era is that Hannity is untouchable.

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Producers ask only for one thing: that his seemingly endless opening monologue (last night’s clocked in at 16 minutes) last longer. Ratings drop at its conclusion, sources said.

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His continued coverage of the Seth Rich conspiracy in 2017 prompted a rare intervention from network brass, who convened to tell the top-rated host to drop the story. Hannity, though enraged by the order, complied.

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It’s a point of speculation amongst staffers how much Lachlan Murdoch, who this week assumed control of Fox Corp., will seek to leave his mark on Fox News. Lachlan’s politics are more in line with his conservative father than his younger brother James, who Fox News staffers deride as a liberal. Still, there are fears at the network that Lachlan will seek to rein in some of its controversial impulses — from hosts prone to sparking ad boycotts to coziness with the White House. One thing sources made clear: like his father, he’ll be exceedingly cautious about interfering with the formula that has kept Fox’s profits surging under the Trump administration.

  Mediaite

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.