A.J. Bauer is the author of “Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press” and a professor in the department of journalism and creative media at the University of Alabama.
The morning after last week’s Blue Tsunami, right-wing media was in disarray.
“WELCOME TO THE REVOLUTION,” Fox News warned on its home page. “Meet the far-left socialists coming to Congress next year after sweeping midterms.”
“Texas just gave a Senate seat to a sexually ambiguous anti-meat communist who needs 14 days of solitude to recover from a sniffle,” cried Buck Sexton, one-half of the talk radio duo that succeeded the Rush Limbaugh show.
The Daily Caller, the conservative digital news site founded by (but no longer connected to) Tucker Carlson, took a different tack. “YOU SURE, BRO?” asked its lead headline, over an image of Donald Trump shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a link to a story titled “‘No Downside’: Iran War Hawks Get a Midterm Reality Check.”
Whether it’s attacking “the left” or indulging in friendly fire, right-wing media is pointing fingers in all directions as it struggles to find a message capable of landing with an audience that has begun to tune it out.
At long last, we have arrived at the beginning of the end of the Age of Trump. As his cult of personality wanes and as various Republicans vie to replace him as the party’s standard-bearer, right-wing media will lose what has become its central logic.
Fox News has lately experienced a steep ratings decline while Truth Social has seen traffic fall by more than 30 percent. Both stats have been widely interpreted as barometers for measuring Trump’s declining popularity. But both could instead reflect growing dissensus within the conservative movement over governing priorities, policy goals, ideological imperatives, even aesthetics — and defections to a new array of media options that allow conservative audiences to find political content more aligned with their ideological interests.
The choices these news outlets and new influencers and podcasters make will go a long way toward determining where the right — and where the country — go next.
But to understand the possibilities, it’s helpful to go back to the dawn of conservative media.
The Fox News revolution
Media activism has been a cornerstone of modern conservatism since its earliest mobilizations in the 1940s. As I’ve shown in my recent book “Making the Liberal Media,” early conservative-movement organizers cultivated a critical disposition toward the mainstream press, and this that has long driven right-wing media entrepreneurship and activism.
The “first generation” of conservative media activism, in the 1950s and 1960s, largely prioritized the ideological and political imperatives of their movement over profit. While many activists were aligned with business interests that certainly stood to benefit from conservatism’s opposition to federal regulation and taxation, most conservative media — from the radio and television programming of Facts Forum to conservative periodicals like Human Events and National Review — was driven by ideas, or a longing for influence, not mere dollars and eyeballs.
The incentives began to change in the late 1980s, when ABC Radio Network gave Limbaugh a nationally syndicated platform. By the early 1990s, Limbaugh was the loudest voice in right-wing politics pushing for a continuation of the “conservative revolution” ushered in by Ronald Reagan’s two-term presidency. President George H.W. Bush even invited him to stay at the White House and, what’s more, carried his bag into the Lincoln Bedroom.
But Limbaugh wasn’t so much a policy- and ideas-driven “movement guy” as he was a media entrepreneur interested in blurring the boundaries between politics and entertainment. Limbaugh was a performer who proved that building a conservative media brand could be lucrative, if one could build an audience and keep it hooked on a story. Others learned that lesson well. As Limbaugh told “60 Minutes” in 1991, “I’m trying to attract the largest audience I can and hold it for as long as I can so that I can charge advertisers confiscatory advertising rates — this is a business.”
Limbaugh was proof of concept that conservative critics of legacy news media could build lucrative audiences in their own right. By the late 1990s, as several outlets emerged to compete with the growing cable news hegemony of Ted Turner’s CNN, Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes, a former Republican media consultant, to help him launch Fox News.
Murdoch and Ailes launched Fox in 1996, though it would not turn a profit until early 2002 — riding a ratings bonanza that started with the September 11 attacks and the George W. Bush administration’s rush to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“If the conservative point of view is not presented anywhere else in journalism, then people will come find us,” Ailes told The New York Times in 2000. For much of the early 21st century, Fox did become the primary outlet for conservative news in the United States.
By the mid-aughts, critics and scholars began to study Fox’s effects on America’s media and politics. But early studies of the right-wing media sector largely failed to see beyond the political exigencies of the moment.
The first major work examining Fox’s impact on our media environment was “Echo Chamber,” a book published by political communication scholars Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella in 2008. They found evidence of a “conservative media establishment,” composed of Fox, Limbaugh, and the Wall Street Journal opinion page.
“Echo Chamber” argued that the conservative media establishment was designed to reinforce the “fusionist” brand of conservatism popularized by Reagan in the 1980s — mixing neoliberal economics, a commitment to traditional moral order and social hierarchies, and the imperative of US hegemony over the world order. They predicted that if “confronted by a serious Republican presidential contender whose proposals and past deviated from the Reagan doctrine,” the conservative media establishment would “marshal against the candidacy.”
Trump scrambles the scene
By the 2010s, as the internet and social media greatly expanded the availability of right-wing media, competition undermined ideological consistency. This competition was initially obscured by the Tea Party movement, with its clear emphasis on fiscal responsibility and constitutionalism. But by 2015, when Trump rode that golden escalator into the center of our political life, he was able to capitalize on the growing ideological and stylistic heterogeneity that emerged as different right-wing outlets competed for audiences and clicks.
Although Trump had been a routine guest on Fox’s morning show “Fox & Friends,” the network was slow to throw its support behind Trump in the 2016 presidential primary. His past as a Democratic Party donor, his flagrantly immoral lifestyle, and his lack of commitment to free trade reflected significant deviations from conservative movement orthodoxy.
Trump was, instead, boosted by the more paleoconservative wing of the movement, as represented at the time by the newly recapitalized conservative news outlet Breitbart. Under the direction of Steve Bannon, Breitbart leveraged social media to help pull other right-wing commentators and outlets into alignment with the Make America Great Again movement’s focus on opposing immigration and engaging in protectionist trade policy.
Although we tend to talk about right-wing media as in lockstep in its support of Trump, several prominent figures and outlets — including Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro, and National Review — declared themselves “Never Trump” in early 2016. Most eventually aligned with Trump’s MAGA imperatives.
Many neoconservatives, most notably Bill Kristol and The Bulwark, defected from Republicanism but continue to create media for disaffected conservatives and the resistance liberals who love them. More recently we’ve seen another schism emerge. Trump’s decision to join Israel in its war against Iran has alienated the more isolationist wings of conservative politics, most notably the longtime conservative cable news figure turned Twitter video blogger Tucker Carlson.
Now what?
Ideological differences and conflicting policy preferences are structural to modern conservatism and have not resolved in the past decade, even if pro-Trump media messaging on Fox and elsewhere has sometimes made them less visible. Now that the right-wing media sector’s center of gravity is weakening, we can expect it to revert to competition for audiences, donor funding, and influence — exacerbating internal movement tensions even further.
The GOP’s midterm walloping will lend special urgency to the 2028 race for the GOP presidential nomination. The lessons that Fox News and other outlets take from the midterms will be crucial. Will they lean on cultural issues that will appear to have lost their salience in 2026? Will Fox and others feel freer to cut ties with a president who led his party into a midterm repudiation? As the results in states like Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska highlight the importance of affordability issues, gas prices, and the economy, will Fox consider a more populist tone and tie inflation to the war in Iran more directly?
Just as interesting: Might more Democrats want to bring their message to Fox News now that the midterms have demonstrated they can win in states where the Murdoch network has long dominated the narrative? Michigan Senator-elect Abdul el-Sayed, Texas Senator-elect James Talerico, and likely presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg have shown that Democrats can be quite effective on Fox — and earn even more airtime on the network, much to the annoyance of Trump.
Many will find a sense of relief in having reached this late stage of Trumpism. But Trump’s fading spotlight won’t mean the end of conservative political dominance in the United States, at least not on its own.
Instead, Trump’s declining influence will make right-wing politics less stable and more volatile as various right-wing media outlets spin their wheels looking for the next message or candidate to unite their fracturing coalition.