.@FoxNews has been treating me very unfairly & I have therefore decided that I won’t be doing any more Fox shows for the foreseeable future.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2015
His statement comes in response to the network cancelling his guest appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, which was slated to take place tomorrow. The billionaire businessman-turned-politician initially caught flack from the network after he made hostile comments to Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly on the channel’s August 6 Republican debate. The relationship between the candidate and the network has been contentious ever since, despite (or possibly because of) Trump’s status as the leading GOP candidate.
After that debate, in which Kelly asked Trump pointed questions about his past sexist comments on social media, many will remember the candidate’s harsh words for the newswoman. “She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions,” Trump said in an interview with Don Lemon on CNN. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her … wherever. In my opinion, she was off base.”
Following Trump’s public boycott of the network, Fox responded with defiance towards the candidate. “The press predictably jumped to cover his tweet,” Fox said in a statement, “creating yet another distraction from any real issues that Mr. Trump might be questioned about.”
“When coverage doesn’t go his way,” the network continued, “he engages in personal attacks on our anchors and hosts, which has grown stale and tiresome. He doesn’t seem to grasp that candidates telling journalists what to ask is not how the media works in this country.”
