Fox News controversies

Based on Wikipedia: Fox News controversies

In 2023, Fox News wrote a check for $787.5 million—nearly eight hundred million dollars—to make a lawsuit go away. The network had spent months telling its viewers that voting machines had been rigged to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. The company that made those machines, Dominion Voting Systems, sued for defamation. And when the case headed toward trial, Fox settled for a sum that would fund NASA's entire Mars rover program with money left over.

That settlement tells you something important about the strange position Fox News occupies in American life. It's the most-watched cable news network in the country, with revenues exceeding $1.5 billion annually. It has shaped Republican politics so profoundly that a former speechwriter for George W. Bush once observed: "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox." And it has been accused—by academics, politicians, media critics, and even members of its own founding family—of abandoning journalism for something closer to propaganda.

How did a television network become so powerful, so controversial, and so central to America's political divisions?

The Architecture of Influence

Fox News launched in 1996, the creation of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. From the beginning, its critics saw something different about this network. Traditional news organizations aspired to a kind of neutrality—report the facts, let viewers decide. Fox took a different approach, one that blurred the line between news coverage and opinion in ways that would prove enormously successful commercially and enormously controversial politically.

The numbers paint a striking picture. In 2006, the Project on Excellence in Journalism—a respected media research organization—conducted a content analysis of cable news. They found that 68 percent of Fox News stories contained personal opinions. Compare that to MSNBC at 27 percent and CNN at just 4 percent. Fox wasn't just tilting in a direction; it was operating on an entirely different model of what television news could be.

Fox has always maintained that it separates its opinion programming from its straight news reporting. Bill O'Reilly, one of the network's most famous hosts, acknowledged in 2004 that "Fox does tilt right" but insisted the network doesn't "actively campaign" for Republicans. The distinction matters to Fox's defenders: the evening opinion shows might be conservative, but the daytime news coverage, they argue, plays it straight.

Critics found this distinction unconvincing. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a progressive media watchdog known by its acronym FAIR, studied the guest lists on Fox News shows. During a nineteen-week period in 2001, they found that Special Report with Brit Hume featured conservative guests outnumbering non-conservative guests by a ratio of 25 to 3. Even if you accept that opinion shows should lean in a direction, the booking practices suggested something more systematic.

When the Family Turns

One of the most remarkable episodes in Fox News history came not from external critics but from within Rupert Murdoch's own family.

In January 2010, Matthew Freud—who was married to Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth—gave an extraordinary statement to the New York Times. "I am by no means alone within the family or the company," Freud said, "in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes' horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalist standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to."

This wasn't some distant relative airing grievances. This was Murdoch's son-in-law describing Fox News as a source of family shame. Freud went further, describing the situation as "a declaration of war" and claiming the company had split into two factions: "Ailes and Fox News, and the Murdoch children—with Rupert caught between them."

Roger Ailes, for those unfamiliar with the name, was the founder and CEO of Fox News. He had previously worked as a media consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush—a background that helped explain, to critics, why the network seemed to function as a wing of the Republican Party. A spokesperson for News Corporation quickly distanced Rupert Murdoch from his son-in-law's comments, calling them personal opinions that "in no way reflect the views of Rupert Murdoch, who is proud of Roger Ailes and Fox News."

But there were signs that Murdoch himself harbored private doubts. According to a 2008 biography, Murdoch had expressed concerns to Ailes about his conduct and was reportedly "embarrassed" by Fox News. Murdoch denied the claim publicly, but the pattern of family dissent suggested the network occupied an uncomfortable position even within its own corporate hierarchy.

The Science Problem

If Fox News' political bias were merely a matter of favoring Republicans over Democrats, it might be dismissed as the cable news equivalent of choosing sides in a sports rivalry. But critics have identified something they consider more dangerous: the network's treatment of science.

Two issues stand out. The first is climate change. The overwhelming consensus among climate scientists—that human activity is warming the planet in ways that pose serious risks—has been consistently challenged, minimized, or outright denied on Fox News programming. The second is COVID-19. During the pandemic, the network gave prominent airtime to skepticism about vaccines, masks, and other public health measures that epidemiologists considered essential.

These aren't ordinary political disagreements. When a network with millions of viewers casts doubt on scientific consensus, the effects ripple through society in measurable ways. Studies have connected Fox News viewership to attitudes about climate change and, during the pandemic, to vaccination rates. The question of whether a news network bears responsibility for the downstream effects of its coverage is legally murky but ethically significant.

The Dominion Catastrophe

Nothing revealed Fox News' internal contradictions more dramatically than the Dominion lawsuit.

After the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his allies claimed that Dominion Voting Systems' machines had been manipulated to switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden. It was a conspiracy theory without evidence—election officials, courts, and even Trump's own attorney general found no basis for the claims. But Fox News amplified these allegations repeatedly, giving airtime to guests who made increasingly wild accusations.

Dominion sued for defamation, seeking $1.6 billion. Another voting technology company, Smartmatic, filed a separate suit seeking $2.7 billion. Together, the companies demanded $4.3 billion—an amount that would threaten the existence of most media organizations.

What made the Dominion case extraordinary wasn't just the size of the damages. It was what emerged during discovery—the legal process where both sides must share internal documents and communications.

Fox News hosts, it turned out, had privately expressed skepticism about the very claims they were amplifying on air. They understood the allegations were dubious. They broadcast them anyway. The documents suggested a network caught between what its hosts knew to be true and what its audience wanted to hear.

Just before trial, Fox settled for $787.5 million—the largest known defamation settlement in American history. The network didn't admit wrongdoing, but the size of the payment spoke for itself.

What the Employees Knew

The Smartmatic lawsuit, still ongoing as of 2025, produced another trove of revealing documents: internal survey responses from Fox News employees themselves.

Between late August and early September 2020—before the election, before the voting machine conspiracy theories—Fox conducted an employee survey. The responses, later filed as court evidence, showed a workforce deeply uncomfortable with their employer.

Some employees wrote that they believed the network was "intentionally helping Donald Trump and the Republican Party." Others described the programming as "sexist, racist, and right-wing." One employee wrote that they felt "ashamed to tell others I work here."

These weren't anonymous internet critics or competing networks. These were people who drew paychecks from Fox News, describing their own workplace as a source of moral discomfort. Some specifically named high-profile hosts they believed were promoting conspiracy theories and partisan narratives.

The survey responses complicate any simple narrative about Fox News. This wasn't a monolithic organization where everyone believed in the mission. It was a workplace where many employees apparently felt complicit in something they considered wrong.

The Political Machinery

Fox News' relationship with the Republican Party has never been entirely comfortable, even for Republicans.

Consider the strange case of Ron Paul and the 2008 New Hampshire primary. Fox News decided to exclude Paul—a libertarian-leaning congressman with a devoted following—from its pre-primary debate. The decision seemed arbitrary; Paul was a legitimate candidate with measurable support. When Fox refused to reconsider, the New Hampshire Republican Party took the extraordinary step of withdrawing as a partner in the forum.

A Republican state party publicly broke with Fox News. That's how seriously some Republicans took the network's power to shape primary contests through inclusion and exclusion.

Democrats, meanwhile, have largely given up on the network entirely. In 2007, major presidential candidates including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards boycotted Fox News-sponsored debates. The Democratic National Committee formalized this position in 2019, declining to partner with Fox for primary debates.

Howard Dean, former chairman of the DNC, called Fox News a "right-wing propaganda machine." That's strong language from a party chairman, but it reflected a strategic calculation: Democrats concluded they had nothing to gain and much to lose by legitimizing Fox News as a neutral forum.

The Money Trail

In June 2010, News Corporation—Fox News' parent company at the time—donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association. This was notable because News Corp's political action committee had previously split donations relatively evenly between Democrats and Republicans, with Democrats actually receiving slightly more (54 percent to 46 percent).

The million-dollar donation suggested the company was dropping any pretense of political neutrality. A media organization that claims to practice journalism was making large direct contributions to one political party. To critics, this confirmed what they had always suspected: Fox News wasn't just biased in its coverage, it was an active participant in partisan politics.

The Academic Evidence

Social scientists have attempted to measure Fox News' influence with varying degrees of success.

A 2006 study from UC Berkeley found a correlation between Fox News availability in cable markets and increases in Republican vote share. The researchers didn't claim Fox News caused people to vote Republican—correlation and causation are different things—but they found the pattern statistically significant.

A 2010 study examined coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, finding that "Fox News was much more sympathetic to the [Bush] administration than NBC." Another study of the 2004 presidential election found that Fox News coverage favored George W. Bush significantly more than John Kerry, and that viewers who relied on Fox exhibited attitude changes—particularly a lowering opinion toward Kerry.

One study tried to place Fox News on an ideological spectrum. Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist, scored twenty news outlets based on how frequently they cited various think tanks, comparing those patterns to members of Congress. His conclusion: all outlets except Fox News' Special Report and the Washington Times scored to the left of the average member of Congress.

This finding was controversial. Geoff Nunberg, a Berkeley linguistics professor, criticized Groseclose's methodology as fundamentally flawed. Groseclose and his co-author pushed back. The academic back-and-forth illustrated something important: measuring media bias is genuinely difficult, and researchers can reach opposite conclusions depending on their methods and assumptions.

The Trust Paradox

Here's something strange about Fox News: it is simultaneously one of the most trusted and least trusted news sources in America.

A 2019 Pew Research survey found Fox News was the fifth most trusted source for political news, with 43 percent of voters saying they trusted it. But the same survey found it was also the least trusted, with 40 percent of voters actively distrusting it.

No other network produced such polarized reactions. CNN, by comparison, was trusted by 47 percent and distrusted by 32 percent. The trust and distrust numbers for most outlets moved together; Fox News was the exception, generating intense loyalty and intense rejection in nearly equal measure.

This polarization maps almost perfectly onto partisan identity. Republicans overwhelmingly trust Fox News; Democrats overwhelmingly distrust it. The network doesn't just report on political divisions—it has become a political division itself, a tribal marker as much as an information source.

The Departure of Ralph Peters

In March 2018, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters resigned from Fox News. Peters was a military analyst, a retired Army officer, someone Fox News employed precisely because of his national security expertise. His resignation letter was scathing.

Fox News, Peters wrote, had become "a propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration." He accused the network of helping "Putin's agenda by making light of Russian penetration of our elections and the Trump campaign."

This wasn't a liberal critic or a Democratic politician. This was a conservative military analyst who had been part of the Fox News stable for years, concluding that the network had crossed a line he couldn't accept. His departure illustrated how Trump-era Fox News had alienated even some of its traditional allies.

A year later, media critic Tom Rosenstiel offered an assessment in Vox: Fox News had shifted from being a partisan network—which is defensible—to being a propaganda network in support of President Trump—which is something different and more troubling.

The 2000 Election Call

Long before the Dominion settlement, Fox News faced controversy over a much earlier election night.

In 2000, as votes were being counted in the impossibly close race between George W. Bush and Al Gore, Fox News' election projection team was led by John Prescott Ellis. Ellis happened to be George W. Bush's first cousin. On election night, he spoke multiple times with his cousins George and Jeb.

At 2:16 AM, Ellis reversed Fox News' earlier call that Al Gore had won Florida. Fox News now projected Bush as the winner. Other networks followed. The final margin in Florida—after weeks of recounts and legal battles—was 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast.

Critics argued that Fox's premature call created a narrative that Bush had "won" and that subsequent Democratic challenges were just sore-loser complaints. Defenders pointed out that the networks' earlier call for Gore—made while polls were still open in parts of Florida—was arguably more problematic, since it might have actually affected voter behavior.

The episode raised questions that still resonate: Should a candidate's family member lead election projections? How do early network calls shape public perception of legitimacy? In an age of instant media, who gets to declare a winner?

The Business of Belief

Whatever else you might say about Fox News, it's an extraordinarily successful business.

By 2010, the network was generating $1.5 billion in annual revenue, well ahead of CNN at $1.2 billion. It had the highest viewership in cable news. Its high-profile hosts commanded enormous salaries and, more importantly, enormous loyalty from viewers who tuned in night after night.

The business model depended on that loyalty. Fox News spent more than its competitors—$686 million in 2010—with 72 percent going to programming costs. The investment in star hosts reflected a strategy: build audiences around personalities, not just news coverage. Viewers didn't tune in for information they could get anywhere; they tuned in for the hosts they trusted and enjoyed.

This created a dilemma that became painfully visible during the Dominion lawsuit. Fox News hosts understood that the election fraud claims were dubious. But their audience wanted to hear those claims validated. Telling viewers what they wanted to hear was good for ratings. Telling them the truth might drive them to competitors like Newsmax or One America News Network.

In the end, Fox chose to satisfy its audience—and paid $787.5 million for that choice.

What Fox News Means

Fox News is many things: a cable network, a business empire, a political force, a cultural phenomenon. It's the most-watched and most-controversial source of news in America. Its influence extends far beyond the people who actually watch it; the narratives that begin on Fox often migrate to other media, to social networks, to everyday conversation.

The network reflects and reinforces something real in American politics: a deep distrust of mainstream media among conservatives, a hunger for news coverage that validates rather than challenges their worldview. Fox News didn't create that distrust, but it has profited from it enormously.

Critics see Fox News as a corrupting influence, a propaganda outlet masquerading as journalism, a force that has made American politics angrier and more tribal. Defenders see it as a necessary counterweight to liberal bias in other media, a voice for millions of Americans who felt ignored or condescended to by traditional news organizations.

Both views contain truth. Fox News arose because there was an audience for it. That audience remains loyal because Fox delivers something they value. Whether that something is journalism, entertainment, political validation, or some mixture of all three depends on who you ask.

What's undeniable is the power. A single cable network has shaped elections, influenced policy debates, and redefined what Americans expect from their news media. The $787.5 million settlement was a setback, but Fox News remains dominant in its category, still drawing millions of viewers, still generating billions in revenue, still at the center of American political controversy.

The story of Fox News is, in many ways, the story of modern American politics itself: polarized, profitable, and showing no signs of calming down.