A growing network of well-funded right-wing news outlets is circling Fox News as they smell blood in the water, according to a column in Salon Tuesday.
Rupert Murdoch's retirement is unlikely to significantly alter the editorial trajectory of Fox News as his son Lachlan, scheduled to take the reins, has very similar ideological beliefs. But Fox News has long been declining as the key player in the right-wing sphere, wrote Amanda Marcotte.
"For years now, there's been a growing network of well-funded GOP propaganda outlets that, using social media to expand their reach, have positioned themselves well to cannibalize the Fox News audience," wrote Marcotte.
"Murdoch's departure may provide the opening they've needed to get even more money and influence." And the problem is that "as god-awful as Fox News is, the competitors are worse: They lie more often and more boldly. They're more explicitly racist, homophobic, and sexist. And they worship Donald Trump like a god."
These alternative right-wing sources take many forms – from fellow cable news outlets like One America News and Newsmax, to huge podcasters like Joe Rogan — and they are doing an even more effective job at radicalizing voters, said Marcotte.
According to a recent New Hampshire poll, just 43 percent of Republicans who watch Fox News and 45 percent who listen to conservative talk radio are voting for Trump — but 65 percent who listen to Joe Rogan and 76 percent who watch Newsmax intend to.
And these aren't small groups – 11 million people listen to Rogan's show, many times more than any show on Fox.
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What this means, warned Marcotte, is that Fox News is being replaced with a new generation of far-right outlets that are even more aggressively rallying people to the MAGA cause.
Indeed, she noted, many of these upstarts view Fox News as a sellout that is disloyal to the former president — a view Trump himself increasingly seems to share. Steve Bannon, who also hosts a MAGA talk show, proclaimed that Fox News is "TV for stupid people," and Newsmax has claimed Fox is in league with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), increasingly a villain for Trumpworld.
None of this is an accident, Marcotte wrote. "Right now, as historian Nicole Hemmer told Slate, these contenders see Fox News as a wounded animal that will be much easier to take out than it was a few years ago," and they are jockeying to "cannibalize the Fox News audience."
"Whether Fox News survives or not, one thing is certain: Right-wing media will get worse. As long as there's a huge audience ready to pay for so much ugliness, there will be shameless people eager to create it."
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