The foundation of Rupert Murdoch's media empire is collapsing, which is pressuring him to chase an increasingly right-wing conservative media audience.
Fox News raked in $1.47 billion in profits last year, according to financial results released Tuesday, but the News Corp. arm of Murdoch's media empire earned just half of that, at $765 million, making his flagship TV network even more reliant on an audience that craves conspiratorial content supporting former president Donald Trump, reported The Daily Beast.
"Fox is between a rock and a hard place with nowhere to go," said media analyst Peter Kreisky.
The network has seen much of its audience turn since the election toward more fervently pro-Trump networks such as Newsmax, and Fox News is facing a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit from voting machine maker Smartmatic, which some of Murdoch's broadcasters implicated in a baseless conspiracy to steal the election from the former president.
"The Smartmatic lawsuit is really just an exclamation point," said media analyst Eric Boehlert. "Trump left the political landscape, he's nowhere to be seen, not granting interviews to anyone, not at Fox. That robs hundreds of hours of news each month for continuing Trump programming. Fox News' ratings? They're in last place for folks who might not follow the cable news wars, they're in third -- last place. That has not happened since before 9/11. They had a 20-year run and for many of the 20 years, it wasn't even close and it's become more close over the last five years. They are now in last place."
Revenues from the newspaper portion of News Corp.'s portfolio were down 33 percent and profits down by 40 percent, to $44 million, which makes the Murdoch family even more reliant on Fox News -- which he believes has always been targeted toward a center-right audience.
"We believe where we're targeted to the center right is exactly where we should be targeted," said said Lachlan Murdoch, Fox Corp's CEO. "We don't need to go further right. We don't believe America is further right. All of our significant competitors are to the far left."
But years of Fox News programming, especially in the Obama and Trump eras, have primed their audience for even stronger stuff that can be found on some of the channel's upstart competitors.
"What defined it originally as far right is now center right," Kreisky said. "To its right is a new constellation of extreme right-wing news outlets, Newsmax, One America News, Breitbart, and all the conspiracy theory nutjobs. Fox's greatest danger is to become just another conservative channel without the sharp identity it once had."
