Laura Ingraham is set to make her Fox News debut with her new 10 p.m. show Monday evening and The Guardian writes that by hiring Ingraham, Murdoch has picked a side in the “Republican civil war.”
Ingraham is “as hardcore a Trumpist as you’re going to find on the air,” longtime conservative radio host Charlie Sykes said to The Guardian. When she starts taking over the Fox News airwaves at 10 p.m., she will be the last piece in hardcore pro-Trump primetime lineup that includes Tucker Carlson at 8 p.m. and longtime friend of the president, Sean Hannity, at 9 p.m. will set a standard for the direction Fox is heading. When recently asked if she would be bringing a “Breitbartesque, hard-right and nationalist-tinged approach to her show,” Ingraham replied, “I don’t call it Breitbart, I call it American,” reports The Guardian.
Ingraham also brings a women’s face to its marquee lineup in a time where Fox is facing a barrage of sexual assault and harassment claims, as well as having lost Megyn Kelly to NBC’s Today show.
Ingraham was born in Connecticut and attended Dartmouth. She wrote for the conservative newspaper there, and, as editor, she gained notoriety when she sent a reporter to secretly record a campus gay students’ meeting and then outed a number of the students to their parents. (The story called the club’s members “cheerleaders for latent campus sodomites.”) She went on to graduate from the University of Virginia law school and then worked her way up the right-wing media ladder by writing a series of books pillorying Democrats and the left.
Murdoch was previously thought to be ambivalent towards the nationalist worldview of Breitbart’s Steve Bannon, but his network increasingly seems to be embracing the former White House strategist and his forces who are set on destroying the “globalist” Republican establishment. Ingraham has been called “Trump before Trump,” according to The Guardian. But she says she will not change her coverage because of that, and that there will be things she reports on that will “irk” the president.
But when Ingraham has disagreed with Trump in the recent past, it’s because she’s viewed his policies or rhetoric as too far to the left. She has developed a close relationship with Bannon, which appears now to be an asset that Fox News wants to cash in on.
“Hiring her is a way to keep those viewers happy, engaged and watching,” said veteran investigative journalist Mark Feldstein to The Guardian. “And the president himself, for that matter.”
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