Fox News says new campaign, ‘Standing Up For What’s Right,’ is not a reaction to Trump’s tirades

Fox News began airing a new tagline—“Standing Up For What's Right”—tied to a new marketing push this week as it's faced with an onslaught of jabs from President Donald Trump. But the news behemoth insists the campaign is not a response to the outgoing president.
The new effort follows Fox News' election-focused campaign, “Democracy 2020,” and a year’s worth of marketing zeroing-in on news. So far, the tagline is appearing on chyrons during primetime shows like “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” with additional creative planned. The campaign was created in-house.
The move comes a week after Trump took to Twitter to bash Fox News yet again, claiming the network’s ratings have plummeted and that it “forgot what made them successful.” Trump also retweeted people saying they were switching to conservative news site Newsmax and the hashtag “#FoxNewsisDead.”
But the new campaign has actually been in the works for a while and is not a reaction to Trump’s latest tweet barrage on the network, according to a Fox News spokeswoman. The goal of the campaign is to pivot to opinion to replace the network’s year-long election campaign that focused on news, the spokeswoman says, adding that the plan was always to pivot to opinion and that it has nothing to do with Trump.
Fox News has historically been known to be Trump’s favorite news channel, but that relationship has been gradually souring. Last week, Trump told friends he wants to launch a media company to take on Fox News after the network was the first to call Arizona for President-elect Joe Biden, reported Axios.
As fitting as the new tagline might be to some in a post-Trump America, it was misconstrued by some as a deliberate reaction to Trump’s tirades. On Tuesday, Business Insider initially positioned Fox News’ new marketing campaign as “an apparent act of defiance” against President Trump, before removing the comment.
Despite Trump’s frustrations, Fox News continues to dominate TV ratings. In October, Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” reached a milestone and had the highest ratings of any cable news show in TV’s history, averaging 5.4 million viewers. Fox News is up by 50% in total viewers from 2019, and the channel has been the top-rated cable network among total viewers for two decades.
That momentum has continued post-election. Fox News averaged more than 3.6 million viewers in primetime between Nov. 9 to Nov.15, outranking CNN’s 2.4 million primetime viewers and MSNBC’s 2.2 million viewers, according to Nielsen.