Now that he’s exited the Trump White House, Steve Bannon has new thoughts on his mind — namely, could there possibly be room in the global media sphere for a new news channel that’s even more conservative than Fox News? According to multiple sources, Bannon has been mulling this idea over for some time and even discussed it with fired Fox News chief Roger Ailes before the latter’s untimely death in May.
The fact of the matter is that although Fox News is a conservative channel, the clout of owner Rupert Murdoch’s sons is growing, and with it are increasingly disturbing patterns of globalist influence. Regarding the Murdochs, Bannon told the elder media baron’s biographer Michael Wolff last year, “They got it more wrong than anybody. Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump. To him, Trump is a radical. Now they’ll go centrist and build Fox around Megyn Kelly [who had previously drawn fire from Trump on the campaign trail].” [Note this was said prior to Kelly’s departure from Fox.] Wolff believes a tilt to the center for Fox would be an effort to draw younger viewers to the network.
What is known is that Bannon is well aware that Fox owner Murdoch helped push for Bannon’s ouster from the White House. Murdoch reportedly has been something of a mentor to Trump son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner, while his ex-wife Wendi allegedly was responsible for Kushner’s romantic reconciliation with Ivanka Trump in 2008. Ivanka in the past was on a board overseeing a $290 million trust in for Wendi’s daughters Chloe and Grace. Murdoch is now alleged to speak with the president directly once a week.
Murdoch’s sons James and Lachlan are not shy about telling peers that they swing in an even more globalist direction than their father. Regarding the violent events in Charlottesville, James wrote to several friends that “Diverse storytellers and stories can make a difference, and that diversity around the world is a crucial strength and an animating force in my business.”
James and his wife Kathryn are known to be fierce critics of Trump, and Kathryn is an outspoken Leftist who has in the past worked for the Clinton Climate Initiative. Both have spoken warmly on behalf of environmentalist titan and former Vice President Al Gore. James was a donor to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008. “James is a giant,” says Saudi Arabian Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, one of the top shareholders of Fox. Meanwhile, it was reportedly Lachlan’s wife Sarah who pushed for ex-host Bill O’Reilly’s departure from Fox News. Both James and Lachlan later removed Bill Shine, one of the two Fox News co-presidents.
It’s this backdrop of globalist intrigue that Bannon proposes to violate.
It’s known that at the White House, “[Bannon] would frequently skip meetings where policy was discussed, injecting his views into the process in other ways, according to two administration officials. He did not use a computer, preferring to have paper printed and handed to his assistant to stay outside of the formal decision-making process,” according to the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jeremy Peters.
Regarding the recent racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia “Bannon… told [White House Chief of Staff John] Kelly that if Mr. Trump delivered a second, more contrite statement [about the events], it would do him no good, with either the public or the Washington press corps… ‘They’re going to say two things: It’s too late and it’s not enough.'”
On this matter, Bannon was correct, as CNN and any number of other mainstream outlets more or less nearly used those words verbatim. In the end, Bannon may have won a minor victory when retired Marine Corps General John Kelly was brought in as the new White House Chief of Staff. The Times said this “put in place a structure that kept other [Trump] aides from freelancing.” By way of example, Bannon said that the “days are over when Ivanka [Trump] can run in and lay her head on the [president’s] desk and cry.” Bannon referred to Ivanka and Jared Kushner collectively as “Javanka,” according to the Times.
Now that he’s not tied down by the staffers of the Trump administration that fall within the Javanka camp, such as Chief White House Economic Advisor Gary Cohn and Deputy National Security Advisor Dina Powell, Bannon is said to be “going to war for President Trump against his opponents — on Capitol Hill, in the media and in corporate America,” according to Bloomberg News’ Josh Green. In a tweet, Green said that after holding a phone conversation with the workaholic former White House Chief of Staff, “Bannon sounded like he’d just consumed 40 Red Bulls.”
Bannon is allegedly poised to “go nuclear” against these collective adversaries, who include current Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Arizona Senator John McCain. According to one writer at news website Axios, the nation’s political conversation “is about to get even uglier, if you can imagine. It’s going to be dark and toxic, with a fight on the right that may be more bitter and personal than hostilities between Republicans and Democrats.”
Potentially helping Bannon to wage this war against these globalist forces and against the Murdochs would be New York billionaire Robert Mercer, who already was the Trump donor who all but ordered Trump to make Bannon his campaign CEO in 2016. Mercer has already helped Bannon’s former and once-again employer Breitbart News (where Bannon has now returned to his former post of executive chairman) expand massively overseas.
At Breitbart, it’s expected that Bannon will jump right back into the swing of things in a hyper-charged way. As soon as Congress is back in session, readers can expect hardline Breitbart features on anything having to do with budget fighting, especially recommendations to President Trump to veto funding for any bills that don’t include money for his much-discussed border wall with Mexico. Likely, infrastructure, tax reform and the debt ceiling will also be giant topics of conversation.
But looking ahead, do rumors of a new network to go up against Fox hold any weight?
Bannon has already held a five-hour meeting with financier Mercer to discuss plans for what comes next besides his return to Breitbart. If Bannon was able to get a new network off the ground, some essential questions for him might be:
1. Would it be purely web-based, without an accompanying presence on cable or broadcast television?
2. Could Bannon peel away any of the biggest Fox names such as Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs or ex-host Bill O’Reilly?
3. Might Bannon form a strategic alliance with the conservative Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which happens to be the country’s largest owner of TV stations?
4. What if Murdoch’s Fox, getting wind of a Bannon venture, attempted to preemptively attack it by swinging to the right itself long enough to fatally wound the new network?
5.Will there be enough of an audience to support both the Bannon network and [presumably eventually more centrist] Fox?
These questions likely have answers that perhaps only Bannon and Mercer are privy to at this time. It should be clear, however, to most observers that the war for the president’s heart and mind is being heatedly waged both inside and outside the White House, and for Steve Bannon, the specifics of his position on the outside may ultimately determine whether he and nationalist conservatives win or lose these ongoing battles.
