Donald Trump is still not happy with Fox News.
Trump made his displeasure known.
And Donald Trump picked a fight with a big-name host at Fox News.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election Newsmax emerged as a competitor on Fox News Channel’s right.
Newsmax saw their audience grow by leaps and bounds as some viewers thought Fox abandoned Trump after the election.
One time in December, Greg Kelly’s Newsmax program beat Fox’s 7 p.m. show in terms of total viewers in the key age 25-54 demographic.
In January, Fox actually slipped to last place in the cable news ratings wars in some part due to Newsmax eating away at its audience.
Donald Trump also repeatedly promoted the network on social media before every major platform banned him.
In a recent interview on Newsmax with Dick Morris, Trump pinned the blame of Fox’s declining ratings on host Chris Wallace.
“It’s because of Chris Wallace,” Trump told Morris. “He was disastrous. It was your basic disaster and he’s just a very negative guy and the people don’t want to hear that. That’s why they tune out.”
Trump and many of his supporters believe Wallace turned in a biased and pro-Joe Biden performance moderating the first presidential debate last fall.
Wallace is a Washington media establishment institution who’s often come under fire from conservatives for offering commentary and analysis that hews closely to the corporate media narrative.
Trump also blamed Fox’s audience looking for alternatives on its election night coverage.
“One of the biggest differences is in the election—even though I won 75 million votes, which is far more than I won the first time—if you look at Fox, how they did versus how they did in 2016. It was night and day, a big difference and people are very angry about it,” Trump added.
There were two sources of controversy in Fox’s election night broadcast.
The first came early on in the night when Fox incorrectly called that the Democrats would gain at least five seats in the House of Representatives.
That was nowhere near close to correct as the Republicans won every single toss-up race and gained double digit seats cutting the Democrats’ majority to their narrowest margin since World War 2.
Trump’s main complaint on election night was Fox calling Arizona for Joe Biden with only 73 percent of the vote counted.
No other news organization called Arizona for weeks as Joe Biden’s margin in the state was just 10,000 votes.
When Fox called Arizona for Joe Biden it shifted the narrative of the media’s coverage of the election toward the framing that a Biden win was inevitable.
Fox later claimed that the result vindicated the call.
But given how close the state’s vote margin ended up being, critics contend that Fox was irresponsible in calling Arizona with such a large percentage of the vote outstanding.
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