Opinion

Does Fox News actually matter? Three columnists discuss.

Three of our columnists — Erik Wemple, Hugh Hewitt and Megan McArdle — discussed what their priorities would be if they were in Lachlan Murdoch’s shoes today.

Use the audio player, or The Post’s “Please, Go On” podcast feed, to listen to the entire conversation.

Here is an edited excerpt of their conversation:

Erik Wemple: Hugh and Megan, you are now Lachlan Murdoch. The empire is yours. Let’s focus on Fox News. What do you do now?

Hugh Hewitt: My first reaction is to do nothing, slowly. I wouldn’t change anything. If you’re Lachlan, the first thing you don’t want to do is lose shareholder value between now and the first anniversary of your assuming executive control of a publicly traded company. I wouldn’t want to be the Liz Truss of the news business.

Megan McArdle: If you’re Lachlan Murdoch, you have to kind of do a little bit of serenity prayer and say, “Grant me the wisdom to change the things I can and accept the things I can’t change.” And what he can’t change is Donald Trump.

Fox News does not have nearly as much power over viewers’ minds as progressives think. I am not cutting Fox any slack for amplifying Trump’s election lie nonsense. But I also doubt that it made that much of a difference. Because ultimately people got the message from Trump, not from Fox. He was the problem. Fox News was the follower, not the leader on that issue.

Wemple: I don’t fully agree with that. I do believe that Fox had a lot of agency and a lot of power. Especially if you look at Hannity — no one had been more consistent in backing Trump. And he’s at 9 p.m., with a huge audience and a huge impact on the polity.

Hewitt: I’m old enough to remember when the former president would go on “Morning Joe” during 2016 for an hour, and then zip over to CNN for an hour and then show up on Fox for an hour. Every network will take Trump at any time because the former president is a ratings magnet. They put him on because he’s great television, not because he’s in agreement with the editorial policies of the network.

McArdle: One reason that we as journalists really struggle with this is that we do not have as much influence over our readers as we like to think we do. We thought that the pen was mightier than the sword. But mainstream media often follows its audience.

With Fox News, it’s maybe more pronounced and more visible. But because we reflect public opinion, or at least the public opinion of our demographic, it’s kind of hard to tell who moved first. I think the 2016 election showed that telling people what to think doesn’t have nearly the effect that we thought and hoped and wished it did.

Wemple: We can argue about how much following and how much leading various news organizations do, but I do think that in terms of Fox News — its role in taking a Trump talking point and putting it out on the air, indulging it, promoting it, just to keep that cycle going over and over again in November and December of 2020 — it had a really profound impact.

Hewitt: I’m skeptical, Erik. We’re just not that important to people. We’re background noise. All of media is background noise.

Listen to the full conversation here: