For decades, Fox News has ably controlled the conservative discourse and enthralled right-wing Baby Boomers. But the coming generations are less moderate than the “Fox family” on LGBTQ issues, immigration, and the celebration of the civil rights revolution—and they aren’t watching the TV.

Fox News indulged in justified boasting on Dec. 17 when it reported the following: 

FOX News Channel (FNC) continued to break ratings records in 2024, finishing the year with the highest share of the cable news audience in nearly a decade as it marks nine consecutive years as the highest-rated cable network in all of television, according to Nielsen Media Research. FNC was the number one network throughout the political cycle and more viewers tuned into the network for breaking news coverage of major events than any other cable news channel, catapulting FNC to another year of ratings dominance. This past year, FNC held 55% of the cable news audience in primetime and 53% in total day, securing the majority of those watching the genre and notching its highest share of the audience since 2015.

Fox News might also have mentioned that incoming President Trump has given multiple interviews to its anchors and celebrities. Moreover, by my count, at least 15 of his cabinet appointments are Fox News regulars or frequent guests of that network. This channel is a major pillar of the media empire funded by the Murdoch family and has close policy and personal relations with The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and to a lesser extent National Review, to name just a few of those communication enterprises receiving large subsidies from the same sources. 

As a Fox News viewer, I’ve noticed how well the channel packages its messages. It occupies what can be described as the right-center in American politics, which means being generically Republican, effusively behind the Israeli right, sympathetic to corporate capitalist interests, enthusiastically interventionist in foreign policy, and painfully centrist on social issues. Fox is far more likely to call for an expanded use of our military or to praise Israel’s Likud government than to take a noticeably hard stand on traditional marriage as the only acceptable form of the conjugal state. The channel’s commentators may grumble about the woke left’s latest excess, but they also enjoy dwelling on all the advances we’ve made in overcoming discrimination since leaving the bad old times. 

During one segment, frequent Fox contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier wondered aloud whether “the pendulum hasn’t swung too far in one direction since we now pretend that men can give birth and breastfeed babies.” This leads me to ask whether Dr. Saphier has some other nutty extreme in mind from which we’ve now swung away in the opposite direction. If so, I can’t remember what that other extreme was. I’m also a bit confused as to whether the U.S. is now the freest, best country that ever existed or a society gravely besieged by internal antidemocratic enemies. One hears both views on Fox, depending on the time and speaker. Perhaps the Boomer audience believes each to be true, depending on its mood.

To the Boomer cult of Ronald Reagan, Fox News has added the periodic worship of Martin Luther King Jr. and the “good” civil rights movement, which supposedly led to the good feminist and good gay movements. All of these good progressive causes were (alas!), according to this narrative, eventually derailed by anti-American extremists. Despite this lament, the channel invites very upfront leftists onto their programs for the purpose of expanding dialogues and even shmoozing across party lines. Sometimes one has to wonder whether Fox News stars dislike leftists in general or only the ones they can’t lure onto their programs. 

Fox grabs up leftist contributors like a sow looking for truffles. Almost all discussion groups on Fox have vociferous leftist participants. One of the most ubiquitous of these guests, feminist Democrat Jessica Tarlov, recently confided to her colleagues on “the Five” that her relatives in California have been “radicalized by crime.” That said, we can breathe a sigh of relief that Jessica’s California relatives are still not radical enough “to become Republicans.”  

Significantly, Fox News has kept as its national security correspondent for the last 25 years Jennifer Griffin, whose husband is the national security correspondent for National Public Radio and who, from her days as an anti-apartheid advocate for South Africa, has been reliably on the left. Griffin did some heavy lifting to prove that Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, were correct when they claimed that Trump once referred to fallen American soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” Of course, I don’t recall Jennifer going after her own party for its avoidable disaster in Afghanistan. Rather, she used that teaching moment to explain that Afghanistan has always “been the graveyard of empires” and that those involved in this disastrous flight expressed genuine regret.

It’s hard to find anyone who is more of a Trump-hater than Jennifer, and Trump predictably blew up at this hostile correspondent in 2019 and demanded that Fox News can her. The channel, however, rallied to her because of Griffin’s reliability as an advocate for its foreign policy stance. This lady never hides her neoconservative sentiments whenever reporting from somewhere in the vicinity of exploding weapons. 

Those most noticeably shunned by Fox News are always situated to the right of its party lines. When Tucker Carlson stepped out of line and began questioning the network’s neoconservative foreign policy positions, he was given the heave-ho. Other dissenters on the right, like Michelle Malkin, were also pushed off the channel, and I doubt I’ll live long enough to see a more authentic right being welcomed back into the “Fox family,” as that network refers to its regulars.

Post-Boomer “conservatives” do appear on Fox News, but most of them (Mollie Hemingway, the editor of The Federalist, being an exception) mouth predictable cliches about American exceptionalism, moderate feminism, and Israel as the one true democracy in the Middle East, which is fighting for America. Although Fox News celebrity Dana Loesch has taken to denouncing those too far to her right as “the woke right,” her sponsors clearly don’t hate all wokesters equally. They are notably more sympathetic to the leftist kind than to those wokesters whom they claim to find on the right and keep off their network.

The channel is always expanding its repertoire of not-very-bright Millennial and Gen Z personalities. Their presence is needed to show us that Fox News conservatism is attracting bright young spokespersons. But none of these stars would ever be mistaken for such independent post-Boomer thinkers as Auron MacIntyre, Jeremy Carl, Neema Parvini, Patrick Casey, or Pedro Gonzalez. The young instant celebrities on Fox News are there to create the impression that their generation is getting hooked on the Fox family, even if the average age of Fox viewers is 70 years or older.

This, however, may be less significant than the channel’s power to mesmerize Boomers and prolong their support for the conservative movement. Although a post-Boomer right is out there champing at the bit to take over, it may never get the attention it needs and deserves. Never mind that this successor generation is generally more intelligent and more literate and certainly more deserving of the rightist label than Tomi Lahren, Kat Timpf, Ricki Schlott, Lawrence Jones, and the multitude of other decorative “young people” who populate the channel. The real post-Boomer right is not likely to achieve comparable visibility until they can create their own alternative to the Fox News brand. 

Lest it be suggested that I am disparaging the Fox News-Murdoch achievement, let me confess that I stand in awe of it. In comparison to CNN and other Democratic competitors, the Fox alternative is a work of wonder. And it’s certainly more impressive in the quality of its production than its pitiable imitation, Newsmax, which is staffed largely by those who seem to have been dismissed from the Fox family. Unlike Newsmax, with its weird, constantly interrupting advertisements and drab settings, Fox News is a visual pleasure, featuring attractive, smiling young women, frequently entertaining commentators, and impressive views of its sumptuous digs in News Corp’s Midtown Manhattan skyscraper. It also provides timely news reports and, from what I can tell, is somewhat less biased in its reporting than its Democratic competitors. 

The channel, to its credit, features some genuinely engaging and informative personalities. These are typified by Greg Jarrett and Joe Concha, who typically discuss the Democrats’ lawfare against Trump and other Republicans, Dr. Mark Siegel, who expatiates on just about any medical subject, and Ben Domenech, Judge Jeanine, and Guy Benson, who lay out the Democrats’ dirty tricks. Not all the channel’s commentary is blah blah, and there is much that a student of American politics can pick up by listening selectively to its news commentators. Those who appear on Fox are always stylishly dressed, and the ladies are well-coiffed. No matter at what hour of the day or night these celebrities appear, they look like fashionistas. 

Above all, Fox News has perfected a complex balancing act. It creates discussions in which the left is usually well-represented and treated respectfully. If one overlooks the palpable absence of anything to the right of where the channel has situated itself, one might conclude that Fox News strives to give the appearance of ideological comprehensiveness. I’ve been listening lately to one of Fox’s perennial presences, Rachel Campos-Duffy, complaining about our “forever wars.” But I quickly noticed that Rachel was talking only about those wars Democrats were overseeing. Apparently, wars that certified Republicans support are another matter. Despite banal reminders that the old Republican Party of the Bush family and Mitt Romney are now gone, Fox floods its aging viewers with faces from that supposedly superannuated party, like those of Dana Perino, Ari Fleischer, and Karl Rove. Different strokes for different GOP folks. 

Fox is now mostly supportive of the incoming Trump administration, which will soon teem with its stars. But for years, the channel featured personalities from both sides of the Trump divide. To those who complained that Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Laura Ingraham were too high on Trump, one could always point to Trump’s sullen critics on the same channel. Some of these unfriendly voices belonged to Democrats, and others like National Review Editor Rich Lowry and The Wall Street Journal’s John Bussey took special delight in going after our 45th and 47th president. 

The channel has also balanced its self-identified homosexuals, lesbians, and even occasionally transgendered guests by playing up Christian and Christian Zionist themes and personalities, typified by Mike Huckabee. It also frequently calls attention to those of its regulars who have undergone religious experiences. Moreover, Fox News recently offered patrons a program prepared by Martin Scorsese on Christian saints.

Fox has also promoted a fulsomely positive biographical movie about Ronald Reagan and interviewed its director, Sean McNamara, and lead actor, Dennis Quaid. References to the Reagan era and the former president’s friends take place as acts of religious devotion. Almost equally venerated is former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who appears regularly on the shows hosted by Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Gingrich often stresses the ideological and programmatic linkage between his two great leaders, Reagan and Trump. Like another frequent guest on Fox, Victor Davis Hanson, Gingrich is happy to pull in Abraham Lincoln as the third in a sacred triad.

The channel deftly fuses the images and rhetoric favored by Boomer conservatism with more updated positions on social issues. This fusion has worked well, and so the channel is thriving, albeit mostly with an older audience. Above all, its success derives from its appeal as a counterweight to leftist alternatives, something that the Murdoch family and other like-thinking benefactors have lavishly provided. Through their philanthropy these donors have been able to define what is now our state-of-the-art conservatism, and the Fox family has reached millions with this distillation of ideas and images. Those familiar party lines that resound on Fox find reiterations and confirmations on other parts of the Murdoch media empire, starting with the New York Post and Wall Street Journal.

The evolving post-Boomer right is less “moderate” than the Fox family on such matters as LGBTQ rights, immigration, and the celebration of the civil rights revolution. This youngish, independent right is also less interested in spreading democracy abroad than restoring constitutional government at home. 

Among the costs of this achievement, however, is the continued delay of the passing of the torch to a post-Boomer right. The evolving post-Boomer right is less “moderate” than the Fox family on such matters as LGBTQ rights, immigration, and the celebration of the civil rights revolution. This youngish, independent right is also less interested in spreading democracy abroad than in restoring constitutional government at home. And it seems less concerned with winning the applause and donations of Zionist groups than the Boomer conservatives whom it hopes to supersede. This right is surviving because of the availability and relative freedom of the online media, especially social sharing platforms like X.com and YouTube, and this will continue to be its only strength unless it can acquire the funds needed to up its game. To its credit, this right is making maximum use of its limited weapons and can sometimes exercise real influence through social media.

The question is whether this right can grow in influence without those resources that are abundantly present for those it wishes to replace. I shall remain deeply skeptical of its capacity to do so until it can start replicating the successes of those I’m now watching on TV. In the meantime, I’m not sure that I see a way forward for these post-Boomers. Fox News and most of the rest of the conservative establishment have done a great job shutting them out. Like paleoconservatives of a previous generation, these militants must look for ways to crash the club so they can eventually take it over.