Should he be unable to prevail in his challenges to the projections favoring Democrat Joe Biden in the Nov. 3 election, President Donald Trump is reportedly looking into building his own media network to directly compete with Fox News.
“He plans to wreck Fox. No doubt about it,” a route with detailed knowledge of the president’s intentions said, according to Axios.
The plan comes amid heightened tensions between the Trump administration and Fox News, which prematurely called several races for Democrats on Election Night.
Fox’s left-leaning decision desk was the only major network that called Arizona on election night for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, even though only 65% of the vote had been counted.
And, Fox News claimed in an early call that House Democrats would win five seats—a completely off-base statement that the channel only recently retracted.
Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner even reportedly called Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch to complain about the network’s coverage on Election Night, and Trump blasted the network on Election Day for giving into Democratic bias.
“Somebody said: What’s the biggest difference between this and four years ago? And I say, Fox,” Trump said.
Over the last week, Fox News’s ratings have dropped, and the company’s stock has fallen too. Trump sees this as an opportunity to step in and create his own media empire if he loses to Biden, sources explained.
Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch said on Nov. 3 that the network welcomes competition.
“Now 18 years, off the top of my head, of different administrations and different political cycles, we’ve maintained our No. 1 position through all of that,” Murdoch said.
“We fully expect to be No. 1 and maintain share through that,” he added. “… We love competition. We have always thrived with competition. And we have strong competition now.”
Trump’s media service would likely charge a monthly fee, just as Fox Nation does now.
One source said the president may even use upcoming vote-count rallies to attack Fox and float the idea of his own network.
