Opinion | How Fox News and Trump wrote the playbook for their own downfall

Fox was, supposedly, the One True Prophet brave enough to tell you the things that “the mainstream media” would not. And the strategy mostly worked.

Today, Fox News has far and away the largest audience of any cable news network, with about as many viewers as MSNBC and CNN combined. It’s hard to argue with a straight face that this makes Fox anything other than, well, “mainstream” and “elite,” at least among media outlets. What was once counterculture is now, unambiguously, culture.

But the company’s growing dominance has complicated its business model. After all, just as Fox rose to prominence by discrediting incumbents, Fox has now provided other political and media parvenues with a blueprint for how to tear down a now-incumbent Fox, too. Or, at least, how to outflank it.

Fox is now at risk of becoming a victim of the financial strategy it pioneered. New True Prophets on the right have emerged, including One America News and Newsmax as well as myriad podcasts and radio shows. They have worked to chip away, with varying degrees of success, at Fox’s credibility among its loyal audience by claiming they instead now hold the monopoly on truth. Fox’s recently fired anchor, Tucker Carlson, is reportedly plotting his own rival news perch. (He has a shot at success, too; is there a more compelling supervillain origin story than having been canceled by cancel-culture-abhorring Fox News?)

Fox now has two choices. It can either embrace its incumbency and try to hang on to its audience by casting itself as a trusted, established news source among conservatives; or, it can try to out-extreme the extremists.

Both strategies carry risks.

On the one hand, doubling down on its establishment status undercuts Fox’s entire brand. That is, appealing to its own authoritativeness might perversely make it seem less authoritative, at least in the eyes of Fox viewers conditioned to distrust this sort of appeal.

On the other hand, presenting ever more paranoid and far-fetched coverage does not seem sustainable. At the very least, it can expose a news organization to significant legal liability. This was evidenced by Fox’s recent $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, which sued the channel for defamation. Filings in that suit suggested that part of the reason Fox doubled down on its bogus stolen-election stories was that it feared Newsmax and others were siphoning off its viewers.

The arc of Fox’s rise, and its current challenges, are hardly unique to the media world.

There has been a long-term decline in trust across most U.S. institutions. This is a result of both actual errors committed by those storied institutions and concerted efforts by ambitious outsiders to oust the institutional insiders.

The story of Fox is similar to stories we’ve seen in politics, for example. In 2010, amid the fallout of the global financial crisis, the GOP’s tea party faction displaced some of the older “establishment” Republicans. Then the tea party itself was displaced by newer, fringier iterations in subsequent years, including the Freedom Caucus.

Which itself has had something of an identity crisis and appears to be splintering.

Trump’s rise was similarly premised on the idea that the GOP establishment was untrustworthy and had rigged the system. But, it’s hard to credibly run against “the establishment” once you’ve already had the most powerful job in the world. (Teddy Roosevelt gave it a go.) And indeed, some of Trump’s critics within the Republican Party pejoratively brand him as the “establishment candidate” and praise alternatives such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the new “insurgent candidate.”

To be sure, there are some parallels of this kind of rhetoric on the left, too — including with the rise of fringier, One-True-Prophet-like lefty media and upstart think tanks whose pitch is premised on the idea that “corporate” media and center-left “establishment” researchers are somehow conspiring against the public too. Smash that subscribe button to learn all the dark truths that elites have been keeping from you.

Again, it’s a business model — one that can work for a little while, at least.