When former President Donald J. Trump spoke to a friendly crowd on Tuesday during his first visit to Washington since leaving office, and was widely covered by a number of news outlets, both mainstream and those more favorable to him.
There was one notable outlier: Fox News.
The network that helped make Mr. Trump a force on the American right spared little time for his speech. She didn’t broadcast his remarks live — and hasn’t for most of his rallies over the past year.
But he appeared live to rival a speech former Vice President Mike Pence gave the same day at a hotel less than a mile away. For about 17 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, Fox viewers heard Mr. Pence without interruption.
The snub reflects a pattern in how Fox’s news programming has treated the former president recently: skeptical and sometimes harsh, even as the network’s highly regarded and influential prime-time hosts, such as Sean Hannity, continue to defend him and distance themselves from the recent revelations from the January 6 hearings.
Fox sent a reporter to cover Mr. Trump on Tuesday and included excerpts of his speech in its coverage throughout the day. But the network’s practice since Mr. Trump left office has been to largely ignore his frequent political rallies, leaving them to smaller, more dedicated outlets like Newsmax and One America News, which broadcast them live and often in full .
On Friday, for example, when Mr. Trump spoke to a crowd of supporters in Arizona ahead of the state’s Aug. 2 primary election, Fox News kept its usual programming schedule with one change. Laura Ingraham’s 10pm program features her interview with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is believed to be considering a campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
On Monday, “Fox & Friends,” which has helped protect Mr. Trump through four years of controversy and chaos, indicated that Mr. DeSantis’ poll results were rising in hypothetical matchups of potential Republican candidates in 2024.
Mr. Trump was not pleased. On his social media network, Truth Social, he criticized “Fox & Friends” for going to the “dark side.” He added: “@foxandfriends just really messed up my poll results, no doubt on purpose. This show was terrible.
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