In March, as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was laying the groundwork for his presidential run, he joined Fox News host Brian Kilmeade to play a nationally televised game at his hometown ballpark outside of Tampa.
The questions faced by Mr. DeSantis were as relaxed as the throws.
“The locker room gets you ready for the press, right?” asked Mr. Kilmeade. “Because your teammates, if they like you a lot, rip you off all the time.”
At the time, DeSantis was seen by many in the Republican Party as the strongest possible alternative to former President Donald J. Trump, who had repeatedly attacked the network and seen his relationship with its owner, Rupert Murdoch, evaporate.
Four months later, with Mr. DeSantis’ campaign failing to take immediate fire against Mr. Trump, Fox News isn’t taking it easy on Mr. DeSantis.
Over the past week, he’s been getting noticeably tougher questions in interviews with two of the network’s hosts, Will Cain and Maria Bartiromo, who have been pressuring him for his poll anemia and early campaign struggles. It was a striking shift for a network that provided Mr. DeSantis with a safe place as a congressman and governor for many years.
Other outlets in Mr Murdoch’s media empire have also been a little less friendly of late.
A recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal criticized a harsh immigration bill that Mr. DeSantis signed into law in May. And The New York Post, which hailed the governor as “DeFuture” on its front page last year, has covered his trailing polls, as well as the response to a video his campaign shared that it denounced as homophobic.
Mr. DeSantis always had to be scrutinized more as a candidate than as a candidate-pending. His decision to challenge Mr. Trump — who remains an audience favorite of Fox News and some of his hosts, including Ms. Bartiromo — was also sure to result in sideways moves from fellow Republicans.
But all things considered, the signs of skepticism from previously friendly conservative megaphones suggest that Murdoch’s media empire may now reassess him as the first shine comes from his campaign.
Even though Mr. Murdoch’s outlets as a whole are less determinative of outcomes in Republican politics than ever, they remain influential, and GOP candidates and major party donors still pay close attention to their coverage.
Whether Mr. Murdoch wants to see Mr. DeSantis as a nominee is unclear. Some of Mr. DeSantis’ actions — such as his ongoing punitive battle with Disney — are unlikely to have pleased the business-minded Mr. Murdoch, who nearly a decade ago called on federal officials to make immigration reform a priority.
The media mogul loves to watch political races and even tweets live responses to one of the Republican presidential debates during the 2016 election. Mr. Murdoch has told people privately that he would still like to see Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin enter the race, according to a person with knowledge of the comments. And he’s made it clear in private conversations over the past two years that he thinks Mr. Trump, despite his popularity with Fox News viewers, is unhealthy for the Republican Party.
A spokesperson for Mr Murdoch and a Fox spokesperson did not respond to an email requesting comment.
Mr. DeSantis’ campaign declined to comment. Privately, his advisers say tougher questions have always been expected and the governor plans to continue conducting interviews with Fox hosts who may challenge him.
Republican voters generally view Mr. DeSantis positively, but he has failed to meaningfully narrow the polling gap between him and Mr. Trump since entering the race, even as he remains the former president’s main challenger. Mr. DeSantis has also continued to show an awkward side in unscripted exchanges where he is challenged — a contrast to Mr. Trump, an unconstrained campaigner who seems to enjoy combative interviews.
The tide has not quite turned yet. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal editorial made another joke against Mr. Trump for adjusting his policy stances depending on the audience he was targeting, and gave Mr. DeSantis a slight boost by comparing him favorably.
For Fox, navigating the coverage of Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Trump, and an already embittered Republican presidential primary is just one challenge.
This spring, the network paid a heavy price for airing Mr Trump’s bogus election claims, settling a defamation lawsuit related to its coverage of the 2020 presidential game for a whopping $787.5 million. Further legal dangers lie ahead.
Less than a week after the settlement, Fox fired Tucker Carlson, its most popular primetime host, in an earthquake for the conservative media ecosystem. The network now faces lingering concerns about declining ratings and upstart competitors eager to claw away Fox viewers who want a more pro-Trump stance.
While Mr. Trump still appears on Fox News, his relationship with the network remains hostile, to the extent that people close to him say the odds are slim that he will participate in the first Republican presidential debate, which Fox News organizes next month. (Mr. Trump, who leads by about 30 percentage points in national polls, also doesn’t want to give his rivals the chance to attack him personally, those people said.)
Mr. DeSantis, who typically eschews one-on-one interviews with mainstream political reporters, has a long and positive history with Fox News.
As a congressman, he co-hosted the show “Outnumbered” several times. In 2018, he announced his candidacy for governor on ‘Fox & Friends’. During the coronavirus pandemic, Fox News’ Sean Hannity praised Mr. DeSantis in an interview and said, “I’m an idiot. I should be in Florida. You should be my governor.’
And after announcing his candidacy for president seven weeks ago in a glitch-ridden Twitter live stream, Mr. DeSantis immediately went to Fox for an interview, even though the network mocked his technical difficulties.
Mr. Trump himself was outraged earlier this year by what he perceived as Fox’s overly friendly treatment of Mr. DeSantis. “Just watch Fox News. They are sooo bad,” Trump wrote on his TruthSocial site in May. “They’re desperately pushing DeSanctimonious, who’s going down anyway.”
He has also studied articles in The New York Post, including one where writer Salena Zito did a lengthy interview with Mr. DeSantis in his hometown, Dunedin, Fla. (The Post, once one of Mr. Trump’s favorite papers, has torn itself into him.)
Mr. Trump was undoubtedly more pleased last Thursday when Mr. Cain, the Fox host, pressed Mr. DeSantis on his polls and asked the governor why he was so far behind.
In response, Mr. DeSantis that he was unfairly attacked by both the “corporate media” and, somewhat incongruously, by Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who criticized him for his tough stance on immigration.
“So I think when you look at all these people who are responsible for a lot of the ills in our society, they’re targeting me as the person they don’t want to see as a candidate,” explained Mr. DeSantis, adding that his campaign had “just started.”
Mr. Cain tried again, saying he believed Mr. DeSantis had “done a great job” as governor, but that “there are people who say there’s something about you that doesn’t connect with the voter for whatever reason .”
Mr. DeSantis waved around the question, noting that his campaign had raised $20 million in its first six weeks.
“We’re building out a great organization, and I think we’ll be on the ground in all of these early states,” he said.
Mr. Cain is not a die-hard Trump supporter. He talked about voting against Mr. Trump in 2016. But when Mr. DeSantis joined Ms. Bartiromo, who relentlessly pushed the former president’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, for an interview on Sunday, he certainly expected to be challenged.
“You did a great job on ‘awakening,’ we know,” said Ms. Bartiromo after allowing Mr. DeSantis several minutes to address his usual topics of conversation. “But I wonder what’s going on with your campaign. There was a lot of optimism about your candidacy for president earlier this year.”
Mr. DeSantis laughed out loud when Ms. Bartiromo read negative headlines about his campaign. He then threw himself into a rebuttal that focused on his efforts to build strong organizational operations in Iowa and New Hampshire.
“Maria, these are stories,” he said. “The media doesn’t want me to be the nominee.”
Jonathan Swan contributed reporting from Washington.
