When former President Donald J. Trump spoke to a friendly crowd on his first visit to Washington since leaving office on Tuesday, he was covered extensively by a range of news outlets, both mainstream and those more sympathetic to him.
There was one notable outlier: Fox News.
The network, which helped make Mr. Trump a force on the American right, spent little airtime on his speech. It didn’t broadcast its comments live — and hasn’t for most of its meetings over the past year.
But it went live with a competitive speech delivered the same day by former Vice President Mike Pence, at a hotel less than a mile away. For about 17 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, Fox viewers heard Mr. Pennies uninterrupted.
The snub reflected a pattern in how Fox’s news programs have treated the former president of late: skeptical and at times harsh, even as the network’s highly regarded and influential prime-time hosts, such as Sean Hannity, continue to defend and deviate from him. of the recent revelations of the January 6 hearings.
Fox sent a reporter on Tuesday to cover Mr Trump and included snippets of his speech in the coverage throughout the day. But the network’s habit since Mr. Trump left office has been to largely ignore his frequent political meetings, leaving them to smaller, more dedicated outlets like Newsmax and One America News, who deliver them live and often in full.
For example, on Friday, when Mr. Trump spoke to a crowd of supporters in Arizona ahead of the August 2 primary in the state, Fox News kept up its usual schedule, with one twist. Laura Ingraham’s 10 p.m. program featured her interview with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is widely believed to be considering a campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
On Monday, “Fox & Friends,” which Mr. Trump helped defend through four years of controversy and chaos, pointed out that Mr. DeSantis’s 2024 polls were increasing in hypothetical matchups of potential Republican candidates.
Mr Trump was not happy. On his social media network, Truth Social, he criticized “Fox & Friends” for going to “the dark side”. He added: “@foxandfriends really messed up my poll numbers, no doubt on purpose. That show was terrible.”