The first debate of the Republican presidential nomination season will be missing the campaign’s controversial but top star.
That’s got potential viewers and the other candidates disappointed, but perhaps no one is more disappointed than Fox News.
The network has been trying for months to persuade Donald Trump to participate, knowing that without him, Wednesday night’s debate won’t get anywhere near the ratings that it would have with him on stage.
Trump knows that, too. Since he is now feuding with one of his former biggest enablers, he doesn’t want to help Fox increase its audience, and thus its take of advertising dollars.
He has other, less vengeful, reasons as well. Trump acknowledged the most obvious reason: At this juncture in the campaign, he has little to gain and a lot to lose from debating against his main rivals for the Republican nomination. This is always the calculation that front-runners have to make. The larger their lead in the polls, the more likely they are to pass on debating their opponents.
Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Chris Christie and the rest in the field may be gearing up to take shots at Trump, but those blows won’t hit as hard with their target watching from a distance.
Trump also may worry — or at least his lawyers should — that he might say something in an unscripted moment on stage that could hurt his defense in the four criminal cases he is facing.
It does, though, seem inappropriate of Fox, a supposed impartial referee of the GOP faceoff, to have wooed so cravenly one of the candidates. According to reporting by The New York Times, in the past few weeks, Fox representatives have dined with Trump at least twice, trying to persuade him to participate. During one of those dinners, network anchor Bret Baier, who will be serving as one of the two debate moderators, gave Trump a call to see what he was planning to do.
One of Fox’s major problems, as popular as it has been among conservative viewers, is that it seems often more like an entertainment network than a news network. Instead of objectively reporting on what’s happening, it oversteps the line and tries to orchestrate the news. It sacrifices journalistic objectivity in the interest of building audience — and the profits that come from that.
Whatever its differences with Trump have been of late, Fox needs him to achieve its business goals. The former president needs Fox’s reach, too, but at this point the network is the main groveler.
