Report: Fox News ‘finished with Rubio’

Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio’s rough week got worse on Wednesday with a New York Magazine report that the head of Fox News has decided to stop giving the Florida senator prominent, favorable coverage.

“We’re finished with Rubio,” Roger Ailes told one of the network’s hosts recently, according to three unnamed sources. “We can’t do the Rubio thing anymore.”

{mosads}The report says Ailes was angry about a New York Times article reporting on a dinner he and the Florida senator had in 2013. Rubio was asking the Fox chief for his support of the Gang of Eight immigration bill.

On top of that, Rubio’s poor performance on Super Tuesday convinced Ailes that he is losing traction in the race. The Florida senator won a single state Tuesday, Minnesota, the first and only primary he has secured.

Since Jeb Bush’s departure from the race last month, Rubio has become the favorite of Republican establishment donors and lawmakers, and many said Fox was purposely giving him favorable coverage and easy interviews in order to boost his campaign.

Rupert Murdoch, the founder of Fox News, said earlier on Wednesday that if front-runner Donald Trump were to become the Republican nominee, the “party would be mad not to unify.”

Michael Clemente, executive vice president of news for Fox, disputed the report in a statement to The Hill:

“Consistent with the golden standard of Shermanonymous’ ‘reporting’ on FOX News and Roger Ailes, there is no credence to this narrative or the many other works of fiction he’s repeatedly been proven wrong on. Lacking any on-the-record sources, and desperate for attention, his stories are full of made-up quotes, but New York magazine doesn’t seem to care about his overwhelming lack of credibility, journalistic integrity and deeply partisan agenda.”

– Updated at 3:56 p.m. on March 3