I don’t know if Fox News covered the coronation of King Charles III on Saturday. Like many other ex-viewers, I haven’t watched the network since it sacked Tucker Carlson last month. Tucker was by far the best, if not the only, reason to watch the increasingly left-tilting channel.
The fact that he was a loose cannon and, in the words of his nightly sign-off, “the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, and groupthink” made him both very refreshing and corporately untenable. Carlson temporarily saved Fox from the calamitous leftward drift increasingly pursued by the Murdochs — owner Rupert and CEO son Lachlan — and their minions. I chronicled the trend three years ago in an article here, “Fox News’ Media Suicide,” which was one of the last pieces Rush Limbaugh read aloud on air (and it was retweeted by President Trump).
And it was a beautiful sight to behold, an almost fairy-tale break from the ugliness afflicting this side of the Pond.
Fox’s success in averting disaster once before gave it the false confidence it could replace any talent — even the top draw — and suffer only minor damage. This shows how far the Murdoch operation has strayed from its traditional audience base, validating O’Sullivan’s First Law (John O’Sullivan is a former eminent advisor to Margaret Thatcher): “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” But it would have taken an insightful, empathic, extra-corporate mentality — totally absent in the team — to understand the customer base that the late, wise Roger Ailes created for the Murdochs, which is now deserting them in droves. The Fox brass should have understood two pertinent facts before firing Tucker.
One, it’s not the same media landscape it was in 2017, when they canned their No. 1 host, Bill O’Reilly. At that time, cable news still had dominance over social media companies. The latter were just starting to flex their propaganda and cancellation muscles, so that by the 2020 election, they could totally erase a Biden scandal story (“the laptop from hell”) and stifle the major newspaper that broke it (the New York Post). Since then, Elon Musk bought Twitter to shatter the progressive social media stranglehold on information.
Two, we’re not the same impotent, tolerant conservatives we were pre-Biden. The government-backed, corporation-spread cultural assaults on everything we value — freedom, family, faith, education, and reality itself — have pushed us too far, well into countercultural retribution. Anheuser-Busch learned this lesson the hard way. After its promotional campaign celebrating cartoonish transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney, Bud Light sales and stocks plummeted precipitously. Neither the ejection of two executives behind the woke virtue-signaling nor commercials featuring heteronormative country kids having fun have appeased the “fratty” lynch mob.
Now it’s Fox News’ turn. Of course, the Murdochs expected to take a temporary hit at Tucker’s 8 p.m. weeknight slot, believing they could absorb it with their high-rated primetime lineup, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, plus late-night comedy star, Greg Gutfeld. And indeed the Tucker slot saw a catastrophic 47 percent viewer drop the week after his firing, falling behind both the MSNBC and, gulp, CNN competition. What the Fox brass didn’t count on — as neither did Anheuser-Busch — was audience revulsion at their company, which diminished the entire primetime and daytime lineup. Whereas their shows generally dominated the top ten list in the ratings, not a single one made the list that week.
Ex-Fox News star Megyn Kelly brutally analyzed the ratings bloodbath. “They’ve lost almost two-thirds of the audience that helps pay their bills,” Kelly video-tweeted:
They’re left with about a third of their audience. That’s stunning. And I looked up and down the board at the rest of their primetime. Which with all due respect to the daytime is all anyone gives a sh** about over there. Primetime pays the bills, period. They’re all down.… Nine PM demo — which of course is Hannity, he follows Tucker, is down almost forty percent, down thirty-nine percent. At ten PM, down twenty-four percent in the demo [the coveted 25-54 age group], down almost twenty percent in the total. And I could go on.
Fox’s low-budget conservative news rival, Newsmax, is reaping the reward of the Goliath’s folly. At 8 p.m., the show starring another Fox News expat, Eric Bolling, enjoyed a five-fold ratings increase from the previous week. As if rising to its new status, Newsmax did a magnificent job of covering the spectacular royal event in the United Kingdom this past weekend, the first coronation in 70 years.
And it was a beautiful sight to behold, an almost fairy-tale break from the ugliness afflicting this side of the Pond — such as Democrat politicians screeching about the death of a New York subway hostile at the hands of a young Marine, and the latest raunch performed by Lizzo or Cardi B. Instead, my TV screen showed a majestic, shockingly Christian spectacle at Westminster Abbey, with everyone in traditional wear, topped by Charles’s medieval robe and crown.
An angelic children’s choir sang classical religious hymns, and clergy prayed aloud. The archbishop of Canterbury publicly invoked the name of the Lord in his Coronation Sermon, as did his predecessors dating back to that of Alfred the Great. “The King of Kings, Jesus Christ, was anointed not to be served, but to serve,” he said to Charles. “He creates the unchangeable law that with the privilege of power comes the duty to serve.” Then followed the Lord’s Prayer, reverently recited by everyone present, and the actual Holy Communion. A glorious rendition of William Boyce’s The King Shall Rejoice concluded the wonderful ceremony. The new King could rejoice this weekend, but surely the Murdochs and Fox News could not.
