Is 2020 the last year Fox will allow independence from its election projections unit?
By 
Joe Biden being inaugurated on January 20 after winning the election was more contingent than it’s now generally assumed to be. One of the events that forestalled a serious attempt at election theft from swing state Republican legislatures was 1)Fox News correctly calling Arizona for Biden when the other networks were too timorous to and 2)Rupert Murdoch directly telling Trump to eat shit when he complained.
This scenario seems unlikely to play out again:
A little more than a week after television networks called the 2020 presidential election for Joseph R. Biden Jr., top executives and anchors at Fox News held an after-action meeting to figure out how they had messed up.
Not because they had gotten the key call wrong — but because they had gotten it right. And they had gotten it right before anyone else.
Typically, it is a point of pride for a news network to be the first to project election winners. But Fox is no typical news network, and in the days following the 2020 vote, it was besieged with angry protests not only from President Donald J. Trump’s camp but from its own viewers because it had called the battleground state of Arizona for Mr. Biden. Never mind that the call was correct; Fox executives worried that they would lose viewers to hard-right competitors like Newsmax.
And so, on Monday, Nov. 16, 2020, Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, and Jay Wallace, the network’s president, convened a Zoom meeting for an extraordinary discussion with an unusual goal, according to a recording of the call reviewed by The New York Times: How to keep from angering the network’s conservative audience again by calling an election for a Democrat before the competition.
Speaking of monsters Republican elites can’t control, Fox News has become captive of its audience as much as vice versa, and even sporadically acting as a news organization is a luxury Rupe was presumably determined they can no longer afford.