On the morning before the 2024 US presidential election, Fox chief executive Lachlan Murdoch sounded undeniably cheerful on a call with Wall Street analysts.
Declaring it a “record” quarter for Fox’s political revenue, Murdoch spoke at length about how lucrative this election had been for his family’s business. “I apologise to anyone who was enjoying their football over the weekend and was bombarded with political ads,” he joked from its New York headquarters, where he will watch the election results roll in.
Murdoch has reason to be upbeat.
Fox News has been besieged by threats in recent years: calls from angry supporters of Donald Trump to abandon a network they thought had become insufficiently loyal, billion-dollar lawsuits over its role in broadcasting election disinformation, the loss of its biggest star, Tucker Carlson, and the accelerating collapse of cable TV. Defying the odds, Fox News has emerged strong.
“During this election cycle, Americans have turned to Fox News more than any other service,” Murdoch said on Monday, running through numbers to illustrate the enduring dominance of the cable channel founded by his father in 1996.
In its most recent quarter, Fox News was the most popular US cable channel and the second-most watched network on all of US television — trailing only NBC, which aired the Paris Olympics. For the three months to the end of September, its parent company’s profits doubled. Shares in Fox have jumped nearly 50 per cent this year, valuing the group at more than $18bn.
Fox’s success contrasts with a broader news media landscape that is wobbling.
While 2016’s “Trump bump” delivered record audiences across the news industry, the impact from 2024’s race has been more mixed. A select group — including Fox and The New York Times — have continued to prosper. However, other legacy media companies face a grimmer picture.
MSNBC, the liberal-leaning cable channel that positioned itself as the network of resistance against Trump, was last week described by owner Comcast as among the “more mature businesses” it might spin off into a separate company.
The Washington Post’s audience has shrunk from its 2016 highs. In recent weeks, the Post reportedly bled more than 250,000 subscribers, or about 10 per cent of its customer base, after owner Jeff Bezos axed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. The Los Angeles Times similarly suffered a reader backlash when its billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, did the same.
Marc Benioff, the billionaire founder of Salesforce, is meanwhile reportedly in talks to sell Time magazine for a $40mn loss to a Greek media group run by a shipping heir.
While Harris’s dramatic elevation to be the Democratic candidate helped ignite interest in this election, Americans are fatigued by the news, according to recent studies. Audiences have splintered across a dizzying array of platforms, with legacy media outlets competing with TikTok and podcasters for their attention.
Trump, meanwhile, has continued to depict the media as an enemy. At a rally on Sunday, he said he would not mind if an attempted assassin had to “shoot through” the press pen to reach him.
“The common news culture is fragmenting and will continue to fragment. Which means no one entity, person, organisation [or] voice is ever going to dominate again,” said Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News. “If Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America, there is not going to be another trusted man or woman in media.”
This is expected to be the most expensive US election in history, with the Harris and Trump campaigns collectively spending some $2bn on adverts, according to the Financial Times’ ad tracker. Much of that money flows to local, free-to-watch television stations — which Murdoch described on Monday as “our election heroes” in terms of revenue.
But in the pay-television world, where Fox News operates, the long-term transition away from cable reached a tipping point this year. In August, Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount, two of America’s largest TV companies, made a stark assessment: their cable channels were worth $15bn less than they had thought. Cable channels have become “anchors around the necks” of media companies, LightShed analyst Rich Greenfield said.
“You can’t over-emphasise how radical the transformation has been in audience habits. There’s been exponential change just in the past eight years,” said Jonathan Klein, who was president of CNN from 2004 to 2010.
Fox’s resilience comes even after the broadcaster infuriated parts of its core, Republican-voting audience in 2020, when it was the first news organisation to call Arizona in favour of Trump’s rival, Joe Biden.
The backlash worried top Fox executives, as revealed in filings last year as part of a defamation lawsuit brought against Fox by voting technology company Dominion. A day after the vote, Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott texted Murdoch: “the AZ [call] was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them”, according to the filings. Fox paid nearly $800mn to settle the Dominion lawsuit.
Fox stood by the Arizona call, and Arnon Mishkin, who leads its election calls, told the FT that he did not feel the controversy had put him under extra pressure this time around.
This unusual US election cycle has featured only one debate between Harris and Trump, which aired on Disney’s ABC. But Fox News secured interviews with both candidates and their running mates, Tim Walz and JD Vance.
Fox’s interview with Harris, which Murdoch touted on Monday, drew 7.8mn viewers — higher than her interviews on other networks, but below the 8.5mn who tuned into Biden’s interview on ABC in July.
Heyward said Fox’s “clearly defined identity” had helped it buck broader trends in its industry. “Fox has a very well-defined value proposition and an older audience. So it’s well positioned to continue to succeed.”
MoffettNathanson analysts wrote on Monday: “While the bulk of Fox still sits within the fading world of linear [television], its narrow focus on sports and news places it within islands of stability and even growth.”
Fox News is set to make $3.1bn in operating revenue this year, up from $2.5bn in 2016 but below the record $3.3bn it earned in 2022, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence estimates.
Even for Fox, though, this year’s presidential race has not matched the audience highs of 2020, when the news cycle was hyper-charged by the coronavirus pandemic.
Fox averaged 2.8mn viewers during the primetime 8pm-11pm hours in October, compared with 4.9mn in the same month in 2020 and 3.1mn in 2016.
MSNBC attracted on average 1.4mn viewers in primetime this October, down from 2.7mn in 2020, while CNN drew 830,000, down sharply from 2.4mn in 2020.
The industry now faces the question of whether its election boost will end once the news cycle eases again. “I think you’re going to see things settle back to reality pretty fast,” Heyward predicted.
Murdoch on Monday sounded undeterred.
“What’s going to happen tomorrow? I don’t know,” he said. However, he added: “I don’t think it would impact us . . . in the markets we’re in, we’re seeing tremendous amount of growth and health.”
