Fox News needs Trump for ratings — and he needs them for validation

Trump is an avid TV watcher, and is sticking with the network that says what he wants to hear

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Topics: Donald Trump, Fox News, , ,

Fox News needs Trump for ratings — and he needs them for validation(Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Where does Fox News end and President Donald Trump begin? It’s increasingly difficult to tell.

President Trump’s dependence on Fox News is well-known to shape his world view, even fueling his controversial statements about Swedish immigration and Chicago crime rates. Now, according to a new report, Fox News is his channel of choice.

The president has significantly curtailed his exposure to CNN and MSNBC, including MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program he once enjoyed so much, because of their constant criticism of his administration, according to Bloomberg. Because Fox News has been consistently pro-Trump, the president has relied on them, along with a few newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and The New York Times (aside from The Times, these are all owned by the conservative Rupert Murdoch).

Trump particularly enjoys spending his evenings watching the Fox News shows hosted by Bill O’Reilly and ally Sean Hannity.

Trump’s preference for Fox News, of which he has made no secret, has been a boon to the network. Fox News’ February ratings have increased 31 percent from the same month last year and their stock shares have seen a 12 percent increase in value since Trump’s election in November. Trump also has close ties to the network itself, with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner serving as a liaison between Murdoch and Trump during the 2016 election, a time when the president was annoyed at anchor Megyn Kelly’s critical coverage. By January, though, Trump’s sentiments toward Fox News had changed.

Kelly later admitted that other Fox News hosts only pretended to be adversarial toward the then-candidate.

To be fair, Trump isn’t the first powerful Republican to make a point of getting his TV news from the overtly pro-GOP network. In 2006 it was revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney had a set of “Vice presidential downtime requirements” for his hotel suites that included, among other things, the mandate that all the TVs be previously tuned to Fox News.

Matthew Rozsa
Matthew Rozsa is a breaking news writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and his work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

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