Steve Bannon, who resigned as executive chairman of Breitbart yesterday, won’t be joining America’s leading media network for conservative thought.
“Fox News will not be hiring Steve Bannon,” a network spokesperson said. However, he could turn up as a guest on the network, but we haven’t heard of any pending bookings for FNC, CNN or MSNBC.
There’s a reason Fox is quick to distance itself from Bannon, as revealed in Michael Wolff‘s Trump tell-all Fire and Fury. Bannon has no love for Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, and, since the departure of Roger Ailes in 2016, chairman of Fox News Channel. Wolff writes:
Bannon collected enemies. Few fueled his savagery and rancor toward the standard-issue Republican world as much as Rupert Murdoch–not least because Murdoch had Donald Trump’s ear. It was one of the key elements of Bannon’s understanding of Trump: the last person Trump spoke to ended up with enormous influence. “He doesn’t know anything about American politics; and has no feel for the American people,” said Bannon to Trump, always eager to point out that Murdoch wasn’t an American.
Murdoch, born in Australia, has been living in the U.S. since 1973. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985.
Bannon had been executive chairman of Breitbart since 2012. He left the publication to join the Trump campaign and became the president’s chief strategist. He was fired 6 months into that job and returned to Breitbart. But after his comments to Wolff about the president’s mental fitness, revealed in Fire and Fury, Breitbart began to distance itself from Bannon leading to his resignation Tuesday.