When Joe Biden takes office as president on January 20, cable news viewers can witness one of the most dramatic 180-degree turns in history.
After four years of slavishly promoting the president, Fox News must hit the brakes seconds after the inauguration ceremony.
Suddenly, the person in the White House is not a Republican. More than that, the network can no longer count on the willingness of the president or his aides to call Fox News at any time of the day or night.
The right-wing TV channel, and its big-name hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, will spend the next four years as the opposition party. The network has done this before, of course – the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency were not long ago – but Biden presents a different challenge.
“Of course we can expect it to be relentlessly negative, but it is a challenge on some levels, because he is a 78-year-old white man, with a very moderate history,” said Heather Hendershot, professor of film and media at MIT who studies conservative and right.
“In the past, they attacked Hillary Clinton very strongly, not only because she was liberal, but obviously there was some underlying sexism and misogyny – and obviously the fact that Barack Obama was African American was central to the right wing attacks on him, implied or explicitly, including on Fox News. “
This is not to say that the Biden government will escape the attack, even if it evades the worst.
Kamala Harris will be the first black vice president and could become a target for Fox News presenters. If Democrats win two Senate runoff elections in Georgia, the Senate will be divided by 50-50, and Harris will have the casting vote.
“[If that happens] it will be there in the front and center as a tiebreaker in Congress repeatedly, ”said Hendershot.
“And every time that happens, it’s a way to attack Biden tangentially – it gives [Fox News and other rightwing outlets] a kind of ‘red meat’ to attack Kamala Harris, because she is a woman and a person of color. “
Biden claims to have named “the most diverse cabinet anyone has ever announced in American history”, with Janet Yellen set to be the first woman to be secretary of the Treasury, while Lloyd Austin, if confirmed, will become the first black secretary of defense.
Pete Buttigieg, an occasional guest on Fox News, is expected to be the first openly gay cabinet secretary as head of transportation.
Fox News is already targeting another diverse group of Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and other non-white women in Congress.
Matthew Gertz, senior member of Media Matters for America, a media watchdog, said this was a topic he continued to dominate, even after Biden became president-elect.
“A lot of what we’re seeing now is less of a focus on Joe Biden himself and more of that idea that he’s going to be somehow a puppet for other figures they find easier to attack – whether it’s Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ”Said Gertz.
“This is an angle that they pursued a lot during the campaign and is something that they also focused on during the transition.”
Fox News was credited with helping to fuel the growth of the Tea Party movement in 2010, which was the initial vehicle for the far right to gain greater influence in the Republican party.
The 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi became a longtime story on Fox News, even when the government was cleared – by a Republican-controlled House committee – of any wrongdoing.
“We have seen to some extent how this is going to play out. Looking back on 2009, 2010, the early years of the Obama administration presented many Fox News comments that were incredibly overheated and conspiratorial. I think it will probably be an area that they will be happy to return to, ”said Gertz.
“It will probably be a source for the scandal we saw during the Obama administration – basically a return to coverage in Benghazi, where the network catches a news event and spends months and months and years and years studying it and telling its audience that the Democratic administration is the source of terrible actions ”.
Obviously, the move from supporting one president to opposing another is not without precedent.
More liberal cable news networks will have experienced something similar when Trump was elected in 2016 – although CNN and MSNBC have never been the same quasi-propaganda clothes for Obama as Fox News has been for Trump.
Still, the most liberal news organizations experienced an increase in popularity and an increase in the number of views after Trump’s victory.
MSNBC and CNN saw double-digit growth in viewership after Trump’s victory, while Atlantic, New Yorker and ProPublica saw an increase in readership. Fox News declined to comment, but a spokeswoman pointed to Nielsen’s assessments showing that the network is consistently the most watched cable news channel.
Hendershot said Fox News may see a similar benefit for its more left-wing rivals, as it opposes the White House.
“Politicized media, whether reviewed or opinion, minors like [left-leaning] Nation or the [conservative] National Review, or bigger ones like Fox News, they tend to thrive financially the more oppositionists are, ”said Hendershot.
“They will have to increase their opposition due to the fact that Biden is president – and at the same time they can have their cake and eat it too, as they do not lose Trump as a story because he will continue to promote himself, incorrectly , like the real president in exile ”.
“So they can do very well financially and politically, because they can not only attack Biden, but they can attack Kamala Harris very strongly, and they can also continue to work on Trump’s story, trying to satisfy that base, because Trump will not go away . “