Bad news this week for Trump – but Fox viewers might have missed it

The network continues to cater to its presidential ‘audience of one’, downplaying his supreme court loss and more

Two breaking stories roiled US politics this week and immediately got big play on most news sites.

The supreme court surprisingly rejected – for now – Donald Trump’s attempted restrictions on mail-in ballots, a blow to Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections.

And the investigative site ProPublica revealed that a Russian oligarch had helped to bankroll the Bahamas wedding of Trump’s son Donald Jr, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The blockbuster story quickly became ProPublica’s most-read article this year and was covered heavily elsewhere.

“There’s no looking away from this Trump scoop,” wrote CNN’s Brian Stelter.

Unless you watched Fox News, of course. There, it was business as usual.

The wedding blockbuster got barely a nod on Monday night: a mere minute on the rightwing network’s evening programming, as the progressive non-profit watchdog Media Matters reported.

It was much the same for the vote-by-mail story.

“The news broke during the 7 p.m. hour, but Laura Ingraham, a law school grad, didn’t bother to tell viewers,” Stelter noted. Neither did the other big-name Fox opinion hosts, Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity.

You would have had to wait until 11.30pm for that 45-second report, Stelter wrote, even as it was a leading story in many other places.

In subsequent days, Fox paid more attention to both stories, but mostly to hand the megaphone to Trump’s trashing of the justices who didn’t give him what he demanded.

Fox News has long billed itself as the more balanced alternative to mainstream media, an antidote to what Trump constantly slams as “fake news”.

But in fact, the network often looks the other way when news comes along that might disturb its viewers, who still number in the millions during primetime hours.

“This is the ‘negative space’ of Fox News coverage, in which they pretend something is simply not happening,” Matt Gertz, who tracks Fox News at Media Matters, told me.

“Trumpian corruption is the biggest part of this,” Gertz said. Thus the endless self-dealing and self-enrichment of Trump, his family and his allies are subjects left to others.

Don Jr’s wedding falls squarely into this category.

Normal news outlets are concerned with informing their audience.

Fox’s network stars and executives have a different priority.

“They are concerned with coddling their audience and maintaining the GOP’s political power,” as Gertz put it.

They are also concerned with how Trump views the network and what he says about individual hosts or pieces.

This is the well-known “audience of one” syndrome. Trump sometimes complains about Fox, but there’s little doubt that he’s watching closely, as he posts segments and praises individual hosts.

The Fox News viewer, to some extent, is in a bubble and happy to stay there.

This shows up in polls like a new one from Axios, in which 53% of respondents said the word “corrupt” describes Trump more than any other quality. (That’s followed by “dangerous”, “out of touch” and “cruel” – not exactly a rave review by the American public.)

But an astonishing 23% said “corrupt” does not describe him. These people don’t seem to know about the cryptocurrency schemes, the insider trading, the pay-to-play pardons and the lavish gifts such as a $400m jet from Qatar.

Or, of course, the Russian oligarch, close to Putin, who was somehow moved to finance a Trump son’s wedding.

How could they not know? They could simply have their heads in the sand.

Or they could think they’re staying informed while watching Fox as it once again explores its favorite primetime topics – race and gender in the WNBA, panic over commie Democrats, the evils of socialism and the troubles that come with illegal immigration.

But some subjects do fall out of favor.

Fox’s primetime hosts, who egged on Trump’s Iran war months ago and made it a favorite topic, have now added that quagmire to their “ignore it and maybe it will go away” list.

Why?

Because it’s unpopular and upsetting.

Of course, so is Trump himself, which raises the vexing question of Fox’s exit strategy from the president the network has supported so diligently and helped at nearly every turn.

No Fox, no President Trump, one might argue.

But now, Trump, with his bottom-dwelling approval ratings and waning power, looks more and more like a problem for the network.

So far, though, he’s one problem that Fox refuses to ignore.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture