President Donald Trump blamed Fox News for the Republican Party's midterm losses, arguing that the network's coverage had hurt his party and pointing to a sharp decline in its ratings.

"FoxNews Ratings are way down (27%!) because they're spending too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats!" Trump wrote, in a post that turned the party's defeat into an argument about television.

In a press release last week, Fox News reported 1.1 million average viewers for October, down about 27% from the same month a year earlier. The network's chief executive, Lachlan Murdoch, addressed the decline on the company's quarterly earnings call on Monday, citing "viewer fatigue".

Murdoch said such a shift was expected in the run-up to a midterm election with a second-term president, and that it was not the result of viewers turning to competitors' coverage. "They're just fatigued and watching slightly less television overall," he said.

The numbers behind the argument

The ratings decline is real but the interpretation is contested. Versant-owned MS NOW and Skydance-owned CNN both reported primetime viewership up by double digits in October compared with the year before. MS NOW had 588,000 average viewers across all day parts in October, and CNN had 402,000, according to Nielsen data cited by Fox.

Those figures are far below Fox's overall audience, but the direction of travel is what matters politically. A president who believes coverage cost him seats is making an argument about influence — and about where his supporters get their information.

The financial picture complicates the story. Despite the year-over-year drop, Fox Corp reported revenue for its fiscal first quarter of $4.57 billion, up 22% year on year. Advertising revenue rose 47%, helped by political advertising and the FIFA Men's World Cup, which aired in part on Fox platforms.

Why it matters

Trump's criticism of Fox is part of a longer pattern of pressure on outlets he considers insufficiently supportive. The network has been a dominant source of news for Republican voters for two decades, and its presenters have enormous reach within the party's base.

Blame aimed at a broadcaster also serves a political purpose: it moves the explanation for defeat away from policy and candidate quality and toward the media. That framing is familiar, and it has the advantage of requiring no change in strategy.

It is also risky. Attacking the most-watched conservative network can alienate the audience the president needs, and Fox's executives have shown they will defend their business publicly when ratings become a story.

What happens next

The immediate question is whether the criticism changes anything at the network. Fox has survived presidential pressure before, and its executives have generally chosen to absorb it rather than respond in kind.

For Republicans, the argument over blame is only beginning. The leadership vacuum in the House, the search for a minority leader and the party's internal debate about the cost of living will all compete for attention with the president's complaints about coverage.

For Trump, the post was a reminder of how he processes defeat: by finding an institution to blame. Whether that helps the party rebuild is a different question, and one that the ratings will not answer.

The media criticism also sits alongside other explanations for the result, from the cost of living to the scale of Democratic gains in the Senate. Those arguments will be settled inside the party, not on television.

The argument also reveals something about how the president understands his own coalition. For years, Fox has been the connective tissue between the White House and Republican voters, and any suggestion that it failed him is a claim about that relationship rather than about the network's business. If the audience is drifting, the question is where it is going — and whether any alternative can match Fox's reach.

Fox's executives, for their part, have consistently argued that ratings fluctuate with the political calendar. Murdoch's "viewer fatigue" explanation is the industry's standard defence, and the company's financial results support the case that the business remains healthy even when the audience falls. Advertising revenue was strong, and the quarter was described as an outstanding start to the fiscal year.

The risk for the president is that the criticism looks like an excuse. Voters who lost their seats are less interested in television ratings than in prices, and a party that spends its first week after a defeat arguing about coverage may struggle to convince anyone that it has heard the message.

The wider news day included related coverage, related coverage, related coverage.

The episode also says something about the president's relationship with the conservative media that built his political career. For a decade, Fox gave him a platform and an audience; now he is arguing that the platform failed. Whatever the merits, the exchange is a reminder that influence in American politics runs through institutions, and that even the most sympathetic ones are judged by results.

The network has not commented publicly on the president's post, and its executives have generally avoided public disputes with him.