GOP Sen. Tuberville Talks Tough, but He Just Can’t Quit Fox News

Two days after Fox News shockingly fired Tucker Carlson in late April, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) showed up on wannabe Fox rival Newsmax and announced that the conservative cable giant was dead to him.

“For 15 years, I woke up to Fox News and go to bed with Fox News. Now I’m waking up to Newsmax and going to bed with Newsmax,” the MAGA lawmaker told host John Bachman on April 26.

Claiming the network was run by a “liberal family,” he then explicitly called for a Fox News boycott. “Folks, if you’re on Fox, turn it off,” the ex-football coach said. “Go to Newsmax. Go to one of the conservative stations. Get away from this mess because it’s absolutely a crime what this Murdoch family is doing!”

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Despite his bluster, however, the senator apparently no longer feels that way: Since telling his base to “turn it off,” Tuberville has appeared on Fox News and Fox Business a handful of times, including two appearances this month.

On the 79th anniversary of D-Day, he sat down with Fox & Friends to discuss his father’s WWII service, making dubious claims about his dad that have since come under scrutiny.

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When he was spotted a few weeks later at a book party for Chadwick Moore’s Carlson biography, Tuberville insisted he hadn’t “watched a minute of Fox” since the Tucker ouster.

Yet, skip ahead two weeks to Aug. 7 and the senator popped up on Fox not once, but twice in the same day. Neither his friendly chat with ex-Trump adviser Larry Kudlow nor his cordial interview with Trump-boosting host Laura Ingraham, who told him to “keep up the good fight” on blocking military promotions, featured any hint of his previous anti-Fox sentiment.

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“Coach sees Fox News as a valuable platform to communicate his message with millions and millions of Americans. Fox has a lot more viewers than left-leaning outlets like CNN or MSNBC,” a Tuberville spokesperson told Confider. “Coach also appreciates the strong support he has received from Fox commentators like Laura Ingraham for his strong stand in Washington for conservative principles of constitutional government and the right to life.”

Tuberville’s about-face on Fox seems indicative of a fading right-wing fervor against the network. Even with Newsmax giving full hours of programming to GOP lawmakers—a transparent attempt to one-up Fox as the party’s de facto comms shop—Fox’s standing on the right appears to be on the upswing, especially with Carlson, the one-time king of cable news, exiled to the hinterlands of the site formerly known as Twitter.

And while Fox’s ratings still aren’t quite back to pre-firing levels, the network’s seen an uptick since unveiling a new primetime lineup—which may partly explain why Fox Corp’s stock value has fully rebounded. One has to wonder whether the Newsmax post-Tucker bubble is about to burst, just as its post-2020 election one eventually did.

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