When former President Donald J. Trump spoke to a friendly crowd on Tuesday in his first visit to Washington since leaving office, he was covered extensively by a range of news outlets, both mainstream ones and those more sympathetic to him.
There was one notable outlier: Fox News.
The network, which helped make Mr. Trump a force on the American right, devoted little airtime to his speech. It did not broadcast his remarks live — and hasn’t done so for most of his rallies over the past year.
But it did go live with a competing speech that former Vice President Mike Pence delivered the same day, at a hotel less than a mile away. For roughly 17 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, Fox viewers heard Mr. Pence uninterrupted.
The snub reflected a pattern in the way that Fox’s news programming has treated the former president lately: skeptically and sometimes harshly, even as the network’s highly rated and influential prime-time hosts, like Sean Hannity, continue to defend him and deflect from the recent revelations of the Jan. 6 hearings.
Fox sent a reporter to cover Mr. Trump on Tuesday and included snippets 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 devoted outlets like Newsmax and One America News, which carry them live and often in full.
On Friday, for instance, when Mr. Trump was speaking to a crowd of supporters in Arizona before the state’s Aug. 2 primary elections, Fox News kept its usual programming schedule, with one twist. Laura Ingraham’s 10 p.m. program featured her interview with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is widely believed to be considering a campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
On Monday, “Fox & Friends,” which helped defend Mr. Trump through four years of controversy and chaos, pointed out that Mr. DeSantis’s poll numbers 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 botched my poll numbers, no doubt on purpose. That show has been terrible.”
