The rumors that President Donald Trump was starting his own media network came as something I wasn’t sure about my approval of, at least at first. Not only was I not sure something like that was even going to happen, I wasn’t sure how successful it would be.
Conservative news sources have always been David’s against the Goliath’s of mainstream networks and their hard-leftist bent. The only red island in the sea of blue was Fox News, but it would appear that even now, Fox is beginning to turn on the viewers that helped build it. Some are wondering how long it will be till it’s biggest names depart, and that time may be coming sooner than we think.
According to the Daily Wire, Trump is strongly considering launching a network of his own to combat the ever-growing creep of leftism into Fox News:
Trump is considering launching an online competitor to Fox News in part to spite the network, according to sources familiar with the president’s thinking, Axios reported on Thursday. Trump has increasingly criticized Fox in recent months over its coverage and then its decision to call the state of Arizona early for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
“He plans to wreck Fox. No doubt about it,” a source told Axios.
The president has extensive email and cell phone lists from his 2016 and 2020 campaigns that he can use to help launch a media venture. Trump may also use rallies late in the year, ostensibly for building support for his election legal fight with Biden, to bash Fox News to his base. Many of the members of Trump’s target audience for a media venture are likely Fox viewers.
Trump is planning to sidestep the boundaries of launching a cable network and moving straight to an online streaming/subscription service.
“Trump’s digital offering would likely charge a monthly fee to MAGA fans. Many are Fox News viewers, and he’d aim to replace the network — and the $5.99-a-month Fox Nation streaming service, which has an 85% conversation rate from free trials to paid subscribers — as their top destination,” Axios reports.
If Trump loses this still very ongoing election then it’s likely he’s going to start down this road. His entire presidency has been marked with battles against a very biased and left-leaning media nakedly attempting to make his life, his career, and his legacy a complete mess. Any other president may have crumbled under the pressure but Trump has not.
He hasn’t because he’s consistently won battles against them. He’s consistently won battles against them because before he was President Donald Trump, he was Donald Trump the media-savvy business mogul. He’s of them, and so he knew them.
Trump creating a media network would be a duck returning to his pond.
Creating his own network will get a lot of fanfare from Trump voters, especially since the majority of them rightly feel that he was cheated out of his second term. They’ll sign up immediately in what may end up being the fastest subscription boom to ever happen. Trump, being a showman, will likely have secured very real talent to help launch his network. Some of it possibly poached from other networks, conservative websites, and mainstream networks including Fox News.
There’s a voice in the back of my head (and likely in yours) that wonders how successful it’s going to be. The entire conservative network thing has been done before, starting with Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze.” It didn’t work out so well and both the network and its patriarch seemed on the verge of collapse before it was saved by a buyout.
OANN has faired better and has become more popular than ever but it never achieved the mainstream success Fox News has. With Fox News abdicating the conservative news throne, OANN may become the new king of conservative media, and should be watched closely. It’s also had the advantage of coming with a cable package, making another monthly payment to a streaming service a burden on someone’s wallet. Things are falling into place for OANN but how successful it becomes remains to be seen.
How these networks will do once Trump’s launched his own network remains to be seen but it’s likely that Trump is going to take the lion’s share of conservative media if and when he’s gotten into it. Through know-how, connections, and name recognition, Trump is more likely to do what other conservative media networks have tried to do, and that’s become mainstream.
It will likely drive the conservative narrative, its shows will be quoted in top leftist news rags because they won’t have a choice, and millions of families will probably gather around the television to watch a prime time monologue, just like they did with Fox News before.
This all remains to be seen, of course, but no matter how you swing it, Trump’s not just going away. Taking him out of the white house is just taking the lion out of the zoo and putting him back in his kingdom. It’s going to get very interesting for America, but very troublesome for the left.
