His president reeling, his cable network at a crossroads, Tucker Carlson began his show Thursday night asking a question that has echoed for weeks among anchors and producers at Fox News: “What is life going to be like for us on Jan. 21?”

“Who has got your concerns top of mind? Who wakes up in the middle of the night worried about your family?” Mr Carlson asked his flock, acknowledging that President Donald Trump would be gone in two weeks “and we cannot change it.”

“The rest of us – and this is the key – will still be here,” he continued. “We’ve got nowhere to go.”

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The imminent end of the Trump presidency has presented a challenge to the enormously popular, enormously profitable Fox News — the crown jewel of Rupert Murdoch’s U.S. empire — whose right-wing stars yoked themselves to Mr Trump more tightly than any other mainstream pundits over the past four years.

Prime-time hosts like Mr Carlson and Sean Hannity spoke darkly of possible voter fraud and irregularities.

But privately, senior figures at the network acknowledged a struggle to thread the needle between the president’s bogus (and possibly defamatory) fraud claims, and the demands of an audience that was increasingly confused at the discrepancies between Mr Trump’s lies and the reporting on Fox News, which declared Joe Biden the president-elect Nov. 7.

Tweet from @TuckerCarlson

Executives at Fox News were unfazed by the lamentations of liberal critics, but the defection of conservative viewers to fringier pro-Trump outlets like Newsmax was more concerning. The prospect of Trump TV, a rival media venture led by the president himself, also loomed.

Now, in the wake of violence at the Capitol and Mr Trump’s increasing isolation within his own party, Fox News is finding a path forward: sympathize with the grievances of a Trump-adoring audience that has finally acknowledged its tribune has fallen. Become a MAGA safe space.

“Tens of millions of Americans have no chance; they’re about to be crushed by the ascendant left,” Mr Carlson claimed. “These people need a defender. You need a defender.”

It was not hard to deduce whom he had in mind.

Anyone expecting an about-face from Fox News — or an apology, as some liberals might daydream — has not studied its history or that of its owner, Murdoch, whose ability to adapt to political change is matched only by his reluctance to kowtow to critics.

Tweet from @seanhannity

With Democrats set to take power in Washington, Fox News’ pundits are trotting out the old hits. On his Friday program, which aired shortly after Twitter announced that it had banned the president from its platform, Mr Hannity promised, rather generically, to “expose what is breathtaking hypocrisy of Democrats and the media mob.”

He went on to attack familiar Fox News villains like the Clintons, the Obamas, Madonna and comedian Kathy Griffin. It could have been a rerun from 2014. (Mr Hannity, in fact, had pretaped his 9 p.m. show a few hours earlier.)

Mr Carlson, who was live Friday, seized on the news that Twitter had closed Mr Trump’s account, warning his viewers that “the crackdown of America’s civil liberties is coming” and portraying liberals as hellbent on silencing conservative views. But he uttered the word “Trump” only twice over the entire hour.

Sean Hannity on the Thursday episode of his Fox News show. The next day, he promised to “expose what is breathtaking hypocrisy of Democrats and the media mob.” Photo: Fox News

It took a moment for Fox News’ hosts to recalibrate after the shocking and violent events of the week.

Several network stars, notably anchor Laura Ingraham and political analyst Brit Hume, spread a baseless theory that left-wing activists – not Trump supporters – were responsible for the violence at the Capitol. (Ingraham later tweeted a debunking of the theory.)

A guest on Mr Carlson’s Wednesday show made the same unfounded claim about antifa infiltration, with no pushback from the host. And news anchor Martha MacCallum initially compared the siege at the heart of American democracy to a minor incident of graffiti at a Republican senator’s house.

By Thursday, amid a flurry of White House resignations and a rising chorus of Republicans declaring that it was time for Mr Trump to go, there were cracks in the firmament.

“To put up a Trump flag and take down the American flag is not patriotic – it was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen,” Brian Kilmeade said on “Fox & Friends.”

The false rumours about antifa involvement were dialed back, and hosts criticised the Washington violence.

Jake Angeli, a QAnon supporter, in the Capitol building. Photo: Getty

Still, no Fox News prime-time star has yet blamed Mr Trump for his role in inciting the riot at the Capitol. And rather than reckon with years of backing Mr Trump and giving comfort to his supporters, the network’s commentators have simply swiveled, finding new ways to take on old targets.

In the Fox News universe, Mr Biden is now a socialist prepared to upend the American way of life. And many hosts have drawn a direct equivalence between the storming of the Capitol by an anti-democratic mob and the Black Lives Matters protests over the summer in support of racial justice.

As repulsive as such rhetoric may be to liberals, it is part of a formula that has rarely failed Fox News, which remains the profit engine of Murdoch’s Fox Corp.

The network’s ratings fell after Election Day, and it has lost badly to CNN in the ratings since the riot at the Capitol. But in 2020 as a whole, Fox News was the third-most-watched network in the country in prime-time on weekdays. That was not just cable news; it was all of television. Only CBS and NBC ranked higher.

–NYT