I remember when a major source of news for the young-ish crowd was Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show", which was technically satire.
But I think what what is or is going to happen on w/ TikTok, NYT, etc is largely irrelevant here. I don't watch Fox News myself, but know many that do. They aren't the type to be using TikTok and want nothing to do with the NYT.
Think of Fox News as a "safe space" for Americans conservatives who want conservative commentary, but aren't interested in the more hard core financial stuff that the WSJ and Bloomberg provide. There is a massive audience for this type of content, which is why Fox News has been #1 in cable news since 2002 and the #1 channel in cable for over 4 years.
I think you're right that FoxNews currently has a core following. But I don't think that answers the question of whether Fox's current economics are based on the continued existence of the cable bundle.
After a bit of googling, it appears that FoxNews gets about $2/month/sub in affiliate fees and has about 83 million subs (slowly declining), which is essentially everyone who has a cable bundle. That's annual affiliate fee revenue of $2 billion. They have annual cable-segment-wide affiliate fee revenue of $3.87 billion. I assume the $1.87 billion difference between 2 and 3.87 represents affiliate fees they get from their other five cable networks combined (FoxBusiness, FS1, FS2, BigTen Network, and Fox Deportes). Based on my understanding, cable channels negotiate on a companywide basis with MVPDs, so I suspect a fair amount of the $1.87 billion represents the leverage FoxNews gives Fox in negotiations with MVPDs. So, let's assume FoxNews is really in substance generating $3+ billion in affiliate fees.
If the bundle fell apart and FoxNews had to go DTC, how many subscribers would it take to rebuild that revenue stream? At $10/month they'd need 25 million subscribers to generate $3 billion in revenue, and I suspect there would be significant additional overhead in running such a DTC operation. My gut says there aren't 25 million people who would pay $10/month to subscribe to FoxNews, but that could be wrong, particularly if there is significant international demand for FoxNews.
Of course, that math far too simple and there are other variables at play, e.g., would DTC subscribers tolerate ads and if so, how valuable would they be with dynamic ad insertion and full knowledge of who is being shown each ad? But in this post I'm more trying to come up with a way to think about how dependent Fox is (or is not) on the current structure of pay TV.