Skip to footer
Politics Watch
A weekly window on the American political scene hosted by the Monitor's politics editors.

Will Trump survive impeachment? The answer may lie with Fox News.

|
AP
From left: Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson, of "Tucker Carlson Tonight," Laura Ingraham, of "The Ingraham Angle," and Sean Hannity, of "Hannity." The hosts reach roughly three to four million people per weeknight.

| WASHINGTON

Dear reader:

Recently, Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera and Sean Hannity had a telling on-air exchange about the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

“You know, if it wasn’t for your show, Sean, they would destroy him absolutely,” Mr. Rivera said. “You’re the difference between Donald J. Trump and Richard Nixon.”

Why We Wrote This

President Trump's strongest supporters are Fox News viewers, according to recent polling. If the network becomes more critical of his actions, that could have a significant effect.

Mr. Hannity demurred – but Mr. Rivera is hardly the first to hypothesize that, if a conservative outlet like Fox News had existed in the 1970s, President Nixon might have survived the Watergate scandal.

And while it’s unclear whether Republicans’ viewing habits are shaping their political beliefs or vice versa, polling shows that regular Fox News viewers are among President Trump’s strongest supporters. According to a new survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, 98% of Republicans who cite Fox as their primary news source oppose President Trump’s impeachment and removal from office.

Even more striking: 55% of those same Republicans say there is nothing the president could do to lose their support, compared with 29% of Republicans who do not cite Fox as their main source of information.

“Fox controls the flow of information—what facts are, whether allegations are to be believed—to huge swaths of [Trump’s] base,” Gabriel Sherman wrote last month in Vanity Fair. “And Republican senators, who will ultimately decide whether the president remains in office, are in turn exquisitely sensitive to the opinions of Trump’s base.”

Yet Fox itself has been showing a few cracks of late. After last week’s announcement that the next G7 would be held at President Trump’s resort in Miami, a number of Fox personalities labeled the move an “unforced error” – and the president quickly backtracked.

On-air sniping over impeachment coverage between daytime anchor Shep Smith and evening host Tucker Carlson reportedly resulted in Mr. Smith’s abrupt decision to leave the network. And Mr. Sherman reports that Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son, has been “holding strategy conversations with Fox executives and anchors about how Fox News should prepare for life after Trump.”

It’s worth remembering that Fox was not particularly pro-Trump during the 2016 Republican primary campaign, notes New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait. And “if the two began to work at cross-purposes,” he speculates, “it would likely turn on him as rapidly as it fell in line after he won the nomination.”

At the moment, however, that’s pretty hard to envision.

Let us know what you’re thinking at csmpolitics@csmonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Will Trump survive impeachment? The answer may lie with Fox News.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Politics-Watch/2019/1023/Will-Trump-survive-impeachment-The-answer-may-lie-with-Fox-News
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe