You could suggest “the fix is in.” There’s a truce in the war (that some said was really only cosmetic and not a war) between Fox News and Republican Presidential nominee frontrunner Donald Trump. According to reports, Trump will be interviewed on Fox News “fairly” tonight — read that, given lots of softball questions or a hardball question that really isn’t hardball but allows him to dismiss it — and a name being interviewed (no surprise) is Sean Hannity.
Trump put out this tweet:
Roger Ailes just called. He is a great guy & assures me that “Trump” will be treated fairly on @FoxNews. His word is always good!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 10, 2015
CNN:
Trump has been booked for a 7 a.m. Tuesday interview on “Fox & Friends,” co-host Steve Doocy said on Twitter on Monday afternoon.
He said Trump will be talking “about his relationship with Fox News.”
Trump has been lambasting Fox for days, ever since he was challenged in last week’s GOP debate. He says the Fox moderators were unfair to him and that Fox should be “ashamed.”
He hasn’t been interviewed by anyone on the channel since Thursday night.
Trump pointedly did a whirlwind schedule of interviews with all the other networks over the weekend leaving out You Know What News.
But the motor-mouth Republican candidate eased up on his criticism of the channel on Monday, tweeting that Fox News chairman Roger Ailes had just called and assured him that “‘Trump’ will be treated fairly on Fox News. His word is always good!”
It’s unclear if Trump’s “Fox & Friends” appearance will be his first on the channel, because earlier on Monday, according to a source, there were talks about a Trump interview in prime time on Monday, possibly with 10 p.m. host Sean Hannity.
It is “highly unlikely” that Trump will appear at 9 p.m. with host Megyn Kelly, the source said — and that’s probably an understatement. Trump has repeatedly and personally insulted Kelly in recent days.
It’ll be Hannity. Hannity is most of the time the de facto public relations interviewer for Republican conservatives. During last week’s debate the moderators acted like old school journalists who would indeed hit someone with the hard questions they believed part of the public wanted answered. Hannity’s purpose is usually to help package a candidate for conservative consideration and voting consumption.
But this shows how much money, bombast, power and in particular ratings power means in 21st century America. Last week, Fox News was Fox NEWS. Tonight it’ll go back to being televised ideological conservative talk radio. Don’t expect the interview to be much different than what Trump would get with Mark Levin, or Rush. Tonight Fox News and Trump both get to do some damage control with the best political public relations interview of conservatives in the business.
Will Red States’s Erick Ericson bow down next?
UPDATE: Yep. You could say Trump “won.” New York Magazine:
This morning, Trump tweeted that Ailes called to assure him that Fox will cover him “fairly” going forward. According to two high-level Fox sources, Ailes’s diplomacy was the result of increasing concern inside Fox News that Trump could damage the network. Immediately following Thursday’s debate, Fox was deluged with pro-Trump emails. The chatter on Twitter was equally in Trump’s favor. “In the beginning, virtually 100-percent of the emails were against Megyn Kelly,” one Fox source, who was briefed on the situation told me. “Roger was not happy. Most of the Fox viewers were taking Trump’s side.”
Things got worse for Ailes over the weekend. In a phone conversation, Trump told Sean Hannity that “he was never doing Fox again,” according to one person with knowledge of the call. The anti-Kelly emails, and threat of a boycott by Trump, seems to have pushed Ailes to diffuse the war. One Fox personality told me that Fox producers gave instructions to tell in-house talent not to bring up Trump’s controversial comments that Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever” during the debate. According to one count, Fox only aired Trump’s comment once since Friday, while CNN mentioned it at least 50 times.
In recent days, Ailes got a glimpse of what a Trumpless Fox News would look like. On Sunday, Trump called in to the four other public affairs shows; this morning he gave interviews to Today and Morning Joe. Inside Fox, this was alarming. “This thing with Megyn got way ahead of Roger and bigger than he must have thought,” one Fox personality said. “Roger wants this to blow over,” another source added. “He’s upset that conservatives are mad at Fox.” Online, Ailes also took flack. Both The Drudge Report and Breitbart News carried pro-Trump headlines.
It has been said that in the case of the GOP and Fox News the tail has been wagging the dog.
This looks like a case of the dog’s digested and deposited-on-the-ground dinner waging the tail that wags the dog.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.