Trump Dumps Fox... Again

Donald Trump's on-again, off-again relationship with Fox News appeared to be off again Wednesday after the still-leading GOP presidential candidate tweeted the following: ".@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."

Fox said it was they that did the dropping.

No signal just what foreseeable future meant, but Trump has certainly been making the rounds. He was on Late Night with Stephen Colbert Tuesday night and seemed to have liked the coverage he got there.

"Wow! What a great night. Thank you to all of the viewers and congratulations to @StephenAtHome http://bit.ly/1Mq0ozx  @colbertlateshow," he tweeted at about the same time he was slamming Fox.

Fox signaled Trump's declaration was something of a preemptive strike.

“At 11:45 a.m. today, we canceled Donald Trump’s scheduled appearance on The O’Reilly Factor on Thursday, which resulted in Mr. Trump’s subsequent tweet about his ‘boycott’ of FOX News," said a Fox News spokesperson. "The press predictably jumped to cover his tweet, creating yet another distraction from any real issues that Mr. Trump might be questioned about. When coverage doesn’t go his way, 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.”

Trump's off-again relationship dates from when Fox anchor Megyn Kelly asked him some tough questions in the first Republican debate that Trump said were unfair. He went on to criticize Kelly personally before talking with FNC chair Roger Ailes and appearing to patch up the rift.

The rift is back open, with Trump retweeting calls for boycotting the network and harsh comments about it.

He has accused Fox recently of having Trump-hating guests and not reporting his "great" poll numbers.

Trump also renewed his feud with Kelly, calling her overrated and tweeting Tuesday: "I think @megynkelly should take another eleven day 'unscheduled' vacation."

One person Trump was praising Wednesday was the late Yankee great Yogi Berra, saying he was "not only a great baseball player, he was a great guy," and tweeting a link to an Instagram photo of Berra and Trump.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.