A Sense of Doubt blog post #3850 - Fox News is not NEWS, and it's dangerous
I have been siting on this post for years only because I thought I had a lot to do to curate and complete it.
Not so much.
And even though many of the posts are from 2021 and Tucker Carlson has been fired from Fox since then, most of this content is still very relevant.
FOX News is not news, by and large, and it has waged a campaign of hate, misinformation, and outright LIES to divided the country into polar opposites.
Trump is just one product of that brainwashing enterprise.
They are not done.
RESIST.
Thanks for tuning in.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/17/6-facts-about-fox-news/
Fox News, the cable channel Rupert Murdoch launched in 1996, holds a unique place in the American media landscape, particularly for those on the ideological right. While Democrats in the United States turn to and trust a variety of news sources, none come close to matching the appeal of Fox News for Republicans.
In addition, more than a dozen former Fox News personalities are senior members of President Donald Trump’s administration.
Below are six facts about Fox News and who consumes news there, based on recent Pew Research Center surveys. You can also use our interactive tool to compare Americans’ usage of Fox News with 29 other major U.S. news sources.
Around four-in-ten Americans (38%) say they regularly get news from Fox News, according to a March 2025 survey. This is similar to the shares who regularly get news from ABC News (36%) and NBC News (35%).
And while 37% of U.S. adults say they trust Fox News as a source of news, 42% say they distrust it. That level of distrust is the highest among the 30 news sources we asked about.
More Republicans trust Fox News than any other news source, while more Democrats distrust it than any other source. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 56% say they trust Fox News as a source of news while 21% distrust it. No more than a third of Republicans say they trust any of the other news sources we asked about, including new media like The Joe Rogan Experience (31%) and broadcast networks such as ABC News (26%), NBC News (25%) and CBS News (23%).
A majority of Republicans (57%) also say they regularly get news from Fox News. This, too, is far higher than the shares who get news from any other source.
Among Democrats and Democratic leaners, 64% say they distrust Fox News as a source of news – more than triple the share who trust it (19%). That level of distrust is considerably higher than for other news sources, including Joe Rogan (40%), Breitbart (26%), New York Post (25%) and Newsmax (23%). However, this also reflects the fact that Fox News is much more well-known than these other sources among both Democrats and U.S. adults overall; only people who have heard of each outlet were asked whether they trust or distrust it.
Liberal Democrats (78%) are far more likely than conservative or moderate Democrats (54%) to say they distrust Fox News.
Even though most Democrats distrust Fox News, around one-in-five (18%) say they regularly get news there – identical to the share who get news from The Washington Post.
On an ideological scale, the average Fox News consumer is to the right of the average U.S. adult, but not as far right as the average consumer of some other sources. As part of the March survey, the Center placed the audiences of 30 news sources on a scale based on the average self-described ideology and partisanship of people who regularly get news from each source. (You can read more about this classification system in the survey’s methodology.)
Based on this scale, the average audience member for Fox News is more likely than the average U.S. adult to be conservative and Republican. But the average audiences for five other news sources we asked about are to the right of the average Fox News viewer: The Joe Rogan Experience, The Daily Wire, Newsmax, Tucker Carlson Network and Breitbart. This is partly because a larger share of Democrats regularly get news from Fox News than from these other sources.
Older Americans are more likely than younger adults to say they both use and trust Fox News. While 47% of Americans ages 65 and older and 45% of those ages 50 to 64 say they regularly get news from Fox News, 32% of those ages 30 to 49 and 28% of adults under 30 do the same. That is in line with a broader pattern that older adults are much more likely to get news from TV.
Older Republicans are the most likely to say they trust Fox News: 76% of Republicans ages 65 and older say this, compared with 41% of those under 30. No more than about one-in-five Democrats in any age group say the same.
Shortly before the 2024 election, half of Americans said Fox News was either a major (22%) or minor (28%) source of political and election news for them. That is nearly identical to the share who said this at roughly the same time in 2020.
In 2024, Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats to say Fox News was at least a minor source of their election news (69% vs. 32%).
In 2024, Fox News was the most common outlet that Americans named as their main source for political news in an open-ended question. Some 13% named Fox News; by comparison, 10% said CNN, 6% said local TV and 5% said ABC News.
Again, older adults were much more likely than younger adults to name Fox News as their main source for political news. About two-in-ten adults ages 65 and older (22%) said this, compared with 5% of adults under 30.
Note: Refer to our earlier posts for facts about Fox News in 2020 and 2014.
Rupert Murdoch says Fox stars 'endorsed' lies about 2020. He chose not to stop them
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/the-corruption-at-fox-news-is-worse-than-you-assumed/
Fox News host Tucker Carlson laughs it up with Donald Trump at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on July 31, 2022.Seth Wenig/AP
The Corruption at Fox News Is Worse Than You Assumed
An explosive legal filing reveals evidence showing the network is crooked from top to bottom.
David Corn
Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter is written by David twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media; his unvarnished take on the events of the day; film, book, television, podcast, and music recommendations; interactive audience features; and more. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out. And please also check out David’s new New York Times bestseller, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.
Isn’t it comforting to have your worst suspicions confirmed?
Last week, the release of a legal filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation case against Fox News disclosed text messages, emails, and deposition testimony of Fox hosts and executives that provided a rare look at the inner workings of a propaganda outfit that masquerades as a news network. They revealed that Fox and its on-air personalities relentlessly validated and amplified Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, even though they knew his claim of a stolen election was utter bullshit. The network, which has billed itself as “fair and balanced,” endorsed and advanced Trump’s dangerous disinformation campaign and actively aided his effort to subvert American democracy. The result? A violent attempt at insurrection at the US Capitol.
By now, you may have read about the specific examples cited in the legal document. Fox’s top hosts and network executives were texting each other and noting that the election conspiracy theories—especially the crap pushed by lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani about Dominion supposedly rigging its voting machines to deny Trump victory—were bogus. Undeterred, Fox kept promoting this nonsense. When a Fox reporter fact-checked these notions and found them baseless, host Tucker Carlson texted host Sean Hannity, “Please get her fired. Seriously….What the fuck? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” When then–White House correspondent Kristin Fisher vetted the absurd claims made by Powell and Giuliani, she received a call from her boss who told her the “higher-ups at Fox News were also unhappy with it” and Fisher “needed to do a better job of respecting our audience.”
According to the legal filing, the most bonkers of Fox hosts—Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, and Jeanine Pirro—provided a platform for the most deranged allegations, even when they had good reason to know they were unfounded. Bartiromo hosted Powell and gave credence to her cockamamie charges after Powell had sent her a bizarre email from a supposed source for the Dominion allegations who claimed, “I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live….The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.”
Carlson repeatedly told his Fox colleagues that Trump was dangerous, suggesting the network could not honestly and accurately cover his election lies without risking terrible consequences—not for democracy but for Fox. “What [Trump]’s good at is destroying things,” he said in one message. “He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.” In a text sent to his producer late on January 6, 2021, Carlson called Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer.” Did he ever share this view with his audience? Of course not. And even though he privately denigrated the 2020 election conspiracy theories as rubbish, Carlson still had Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy, on his show and handed him a platform to spout his usual crackpot accusations about Dominion conspiring with the Deep State and other nefarious entities to falsify the vote count in Joe Biden’s favor.
No other self-proclaimed news organization has ever been so fully discredited as Fox has been with this one legal brief. (You should read the document.) This is not the case of one reporter, one editor, or one story going off the rails. This is an indictment of an entire outfit. The full barrel of apples is rotten to the core. What this filing demonstrates is that the Fox universe is racked with corruption, greed, fear, irrationality, cynicism, and ignorance—from top to bottom. That ought to be the ultimate takeaway.
Let’s start at the top with Rupert Murdoch, the hands-on, 91-year-old ruler of this evil empire. The filing notes that Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch were regular participants in the twice-daily editorial meetings for the network during the 2020 postelection period. One email Murdoch sent Suzanne Scott, the Fox CEO, on November 16, indicates that he helped shape the network’s strategy for covering Trump’s falsehoods. Responding to a Wall Street Journal article about Newsmax, a far-right website that was leaning hard into election conspiracy claptrap and that Fox execs eyed warily as competition, he wrote, “These people should be watched, if skeptically. Trump will concede eventually and we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can. We don’t want to antagonize Trump further, but Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt. Everything at stake here.” Helping any way we can. For Murdoch that was a remit that did not call for honest and straightforward reporting.
Murdoch comes across as a real-life version of Succession’s Logan Roy, fully in charge of Fox, fully dominating the corporate hierarchy, and fully capable of stopping its coverage of what he privately called “really crazy stuff.” According to the filing, Murdoch at one point asked Scott whether it was “unarguable that high-profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6 [was] an important chance to have the results overturned.” Fox executives responded with 50 examples of such instances when it did precisely that. Yet Murdoch, as far as we know, never gave the order to knock off promoting Trump’s garbage. The network continued to push this unfounded paranoia. Why? The irrational ignorance of its viewers—and the network’s money-grubbing.
As I noted in my recent book, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, for seven decades the GOP has been both exploiting and encouraging the grievances, resentments, and fears of its conservative base. Fox has been doing the same for the past 26 years. It has presented a steady stream of paranoia and conspiracy theories to its audience, constantly declaring that the Democrats and the left are out to destroy America with death panels, a war on Christmas, CRT, Antifa, open borders, gay rights, the replacement of white people, climate change actions, a secret-socialist-Muslim president, and anything else that will inspire rage and fear. No surprise, the network’s viewers, with their extreme biases confirmed by Fox, believed all this bunk and craved more. Fox had long catered to viewers who lived in an alternative and frightening reality—Joe Biden is a pedophile commie!!!—and recklessly reinforced their fact-free anxieties. After Trump was declared the loser and falsely insisted the election had been rigged against him, these viewers, assuming the worst of the God-hating and USA-despising libs, fully accepted his lies and expected the network to bolster them and lead the charge.
Just as the GOP had become hostage to a base that had been radicalized over the years—thanks to the divisive and demagogic politicking of Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and then Trump—Fox now was dependent upon a rabid and Trumpified audience for ratings and, thus, revenue. Its host and personalities feared the wrath of Fox viewers who had been conditioned by years of Fox’s Manichaean and skewed coverage to yearn for even bloodier red meat and who now demanded the network champion the Big Lie. They were enraged that Fox on election night called Arizona for Biden and then days later declared Biden the ultimate victor. And that ire, the Fox team worried, could lead these viewers to switch off Fox and head toward Newsmax.
The filing is filled with texts and emails between Fox executives and hosts emphasizing they had to kowtow to their incensed viewers. Carlson told Scott directly, “I’ve never seen a reaction like this, to any media company. Kills me to watch it.” In an exchange with Lachlan Murdoch, Scott stated that in order to maintain the “trust” of viewers, the network had to let them know “we hear them and respect them.” Which meant play to the Trump-fueled, unfounded belief that the election was crooked. In another message to another Fox exec, she termed calling Arizona for Biden a failure “to protect the brand.” In a different message, Scott noted, “The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us…We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.” Put simply, Fox could not tell the audience the truth. Their viewers could not handle it.
Carlson realized this. After Fox declared Biden the winner, he texted his producer: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real…an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”
Hannity viewed the situation the way a politician—not a journalist—would. He told fellow host Steve Doocy that the network was facing a “major backlash” from the audience, adding, “You don’t piss off the base.” He texted Carlson and Ingraham, “The network is being rejected.” Carlson responded, “I’ve heard from angry viewers every hour of the day all weekend, including at dinner tonight,” to which Hannity replied, “Same same same. Never before has this ever happened.”
Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham, and the rest of the Fox crew had trained their viewers to believe the worst of the Democrats and accept the flood of lies from Trump and his comrades on the right. Now they couldn’t flip the switch. And they worried about their livelihoods: If they told their viewers the truth—there was no significant election fraud; the conspiracy theorists were hurling hogwash—their audience would turn to Newsmax and the network would suffer financially. So, as Dominion’s lawyers claim in this brief, Fox hosts and execs spoonfed their viewers more lies and falsehoods, knowing this was all one big con.
This cynical hustle was in sync with Trump’s brazen attempt to torpedo the US Constitution and prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Days after the election, Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, sent a message to Bartiromo: “71 million voters will never accept Biden. This process is to destroy his presidency before it even starts; IF it even starts…We either close on Trump’s victory or del[e]gitimize Biden….THE PLAN.” Bannon was not passing information to a journalist looking to report on what the Trump crowd was plotting. This was a note shared with a partner who Bannon expected to join the Trump scheme to sabotage democracy. Given the evidence cited in this filing, Bannon was right to expect this.
To some, it is no big shock to discover that Fox is driven to inflame not inform its audience. But if there were ever any debate over that, this document settles the matter. For financial profit, Fox has for years radicalized its viewers and reaffirmed their most profound apprehensions and most malevolent biases. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Fox had to pander to what they had created or risk losing audience share. It chose the latter, opting for demagoguery over democracy to make a buck.
With these revelations, Fox ought to be permanently branded a fraud. Yet that won’t happen on the right. It remains too useful for Republicans and still has a hold on the party’s far-right and extremist base (which itself has a hold on Fox). On Monday, Axios reported that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has given Carlson exclusive access to 41,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from the January 6 riot. McCarthy, who once promised more accountability in Congress, is handing this booty only to a broadcaster who promoted the idea that the January 6 assault was a false flag operation mounted by the Deep State and who has been revealed in this filing as a scheming phony who knowingly promotes lies for profit.
In its brief, Dominion accurately declares: “Broadcasters make choices about what to air. While that platform comes with tremendous power, it also carries an obligation to tell the truth. Fox…decided to use its megaphone to spread falsehoods. It deceived millions of people.” Its coverage of the 2020 election was no anomaly. This episode illuminates the fundamental nature of Fox. Defamation lawsuits are often threats to reporters and journalism overall. But in the Dominion case against Fox, Murdoch’s company is being exposed for what it is: a disinformation-for-profit noise machine controlled by a vile billionaire and operated by a pack of jackals who distort and pervert the national discourse. Whatever happens with this case, that’s a win for the truth.
It’s Time to Crush Fox News
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2021/01/its-time-to-crush-fox-news/
Max Boot says that it’s all very well to fight the social media sites which promoted the lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, but if you really want to make a difference you need to go straight to the source: Fox News.
To its credit, Fox News acknowledged that Joe Biden won. But, reports Media Matters for America, “in the two weeks after Fox News called the election for Biden, Fox News cast doubt on the results of the election at least 774 times.” According to NPR, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said Trump’s opponents in the government were guilty of “treason” and that it would be “criminal” for Republicans to recognize Biden’s victory. Fox News host Mark Levin told viewers: “If we don’t fight on Jan. 6 on the floor of the Senate and the House — and that is the joint meeting of Congress on these electors — then we are done.”
….James and Kathryn Murdoch, part of the family that controls Fox News, just called on “media property owners” to stop propagating “lies” that “have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces.” If James’s brother, Lachlan (co-chairman of News Corp and chief executive of Fox Corporation), and father, Rupert (executive chairman of News Corp and co-chairman of Fox Corporation), won’t listen, then large cable companies such as Comcast and Charter Spectrum, which carry Fox News and provide much of its revenue in the form of user fees, need to step in and kick Fox News off.
I appreciate the fighting spirit here, but cable companies aren’t going to boot off Fox News. Contracts alone would prevent them from doing so. But there’s another way: boycotts.
This may sound tiresome. It’s not as if there aren’t already people who are trying to lead boycotts of Fox News advertisers. But here’s the difference: if we want to make a difference, we should target one big advertiser and leave the rest alone for now. This is what the UAW does: they negotiate with one car company, which sets a pattern for their contracts with everyone else. And they don’t pick their victim randomly. They pick the company that seems most vulnerable to a strike threat.
So who would that be? Ideally, a company that (a) can’t afford to be associated even slightly with unAmerican activity, and (b) is not in the greatest financial shape. You also want a company that’s relatively easy to boycott. Big conglomerates, for example, make so many things that it’s hard to get people to boycott them all. Likewise, pharmaceutical companies make drugs that might be lifesavers for a lot of people. But then there’s . . . General Motors. Allstate. Applebees. Any one of those might be a good target.
Some Super PAC with a lot of money ought to pick one of these targets and go after them. It can hardly do any harm, can it? One way or another, we need to make Fox News into a pariah.
Fox News Decides It’s Not Right-Wing Enough
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2021/01/fox-news-decides-its-not-right-wing-enough/
Just when you think Fox News can hardly get any worse . . .
At Fox News, It’s Always About Scary Threats to White People
So here’s how things work on Fox News. This is from Laura Ingraham’s show a few minutes ago.
First, she invites New York state senator George Borello to discuss a bill in the state Assembly that would allow the governor to detain anyone who is “or may be” a public health risk. They both agree this is outrageous. Where’s the due process? If you’re out in the woods and someone reports you for not wearing a mask, can you be unilaterally detained? Where’s the ACLU on all this?
Quick cut, and next up is Chris Rufo, a Fox regular who’s made a name for himself by inveighing against critical race theory. Ingraham feigns an ah-hah moment: you know, she says, New York governor Andrew Cuomo has called systemic racism a public health crisis. So does this mean he could detain anyone he thinks is a racist? Rufo enthusiastically agrees. This is yet another example of liberals inventing a crisis (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic) in order to control the movements and words of ordinary Americans.
Scary stuff, says Ingraham. Please keep on it. We’ll be back after a few words from the MyPillow guy.
Check out what’s going on here. First, there’s no bill in any serious sense of the word. This is something that was introduced years ago during the Ebola scare and has been reintroduced every year since, never even getting out of committee. Cuomo’s spox says he’s never even heard of it.
Ingraham then takes this nonexistent bill and makes it into a race thing. How? It hardly seems possible, but Ingraham manages the pretzel bending by taking something Cuomo once said—namely that high rates of COVID-19 in the Black community show that “racism is a public health crisis”—and absurdly twisting it into the scary possibility that Cuomo might start locking up anyone who tells an off-color joke. In a nutshell, it goes like this:
- Introduce scary story about minor state legislation regarding public health that has no chance of ever going anywhere.
- Invent out of whole cloth a segue into racism as a public health issue.
- Conclude that liberals want to lock up white people they disapprove of.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the pros do it.
Forget Social Media: Fox News Is Still the Real Problem
I get questions. For example, one reader emails to ask my why I have such a special animus towards Fox News. Isn’t social media the big problem right now? And aren’t all the right-wing radio shows just as bad?
Sure. But let’s take the radio contingent first. In many cases they’re worse than Fox. But here’s the difference: even the most devoted fans who listen to them understand that Rush and Hugh and Mark and all the other AM talkers are engaged in opinion-mongering. It’s extreme opinion-mongering, but still, at its core it’s bar room hot air.
Fox News is different. You and I and all the Beltway sophisticates understand that “prime time Fox” is also bar room hot air. But you’d be surprised at just how differently the average Fox viewer sees things. Start with the basics: The organization is called Fox News! It’s got news right in its name. And during the day it looks like news, too. It has studios and anchors and reporters who tell you what’s going on around the world. Other networks treat it like a news organization. And that Bret Baier fellow seems pretty fair-minded, doesn’t he?
Now, do you think this all changes when the clock ticks over to 8 pm and the daytime news folks give way to the primetime stars? Do Fox viewers suddenly realize that everything is different and this is no longer news? Nope. It’s just a different set of anchors and a different set of guests. But it’s all still news. Right?
Many of you will find this hard to believe. Perhaps you cling to the notion that the real problem is the tainted information Fox delivers even during its news programs. It’s not. The problem is (currently) Tucker and Sean and Laura and Lou and Jeanine and all the rest of the insanity posse. You know they’re different from everyday news anchors but the average person doesn’t. The average person simply has no idea how news works. It’s all just an interchangeable set of people in suits and ties, some of whom you like better than others.
If you don’t believe me, go ahead and ask a few friends some basic questions about the news biz.¹ Who writes the headlines in a newspaper? What’s an op-ed? Who decides which stories to play up every day? How does advertising affect news content? You will find that their ignorance is near total.
I continue to be haunted by an offhand question a friend asked me a few years ago. I don’t remember what the Fox outrage du jour was, but he asked me why I was skeptical. It was something so outrageous that I wasn’t prepared for it, so I just said lamely, “They’re lying.” He asked, in all sincerity I think, “But why would they lie?” I had no answer—not one that would do me any good, anyway. As far as he was concerned, Fox was a news outlet. Why would a news outlet baldly lie?
And he was right. A news outlet might get something wrong. It might have biases here and there. But their job is to tell you what happened in the world. They don’t just lie about it. So why should he believe that Fox News lies? All of us smart folks know the answer, but it’s not one that will persuade anybody who doesn’t already believe it.
But what about social media? Over at New York, Kara Swisher says it’s time for Facebook and Twitter to ban Donald Trump forever. Sure. Fine. But this is just a distraction. I have much more to say about this, which I will share with you someday,² but social media isn’t fundamentally our problem. The evidence we have suggests that social media appeals primarily to people who are already part of a conspiratorial bubble and it therefore doesn’t really change a lot of minds. Minds get changed only when one of its hobbyhorses gets picked up by mainstream news—which usually means Fox. And the evidence on that score is very clear: Fox does change minds and it does influence elections—and Republican politicians know it. Donald Trump is not fundamentally the problem with American politics right now. He is merely the unsurprising product of a quarter century of Fox News.
Fox is the cesspool from which our political polarization and 50-50 hatred arise. Newt Gingrich may have been the original instigator, but his influence was less personal than it was institutional: he provided Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch with the blueprint for a market-dominating cable outlet dedicated to Gingrich’s vision. Until that changes, the United States will never be whole again.
¹Ideally, these will be people who aren’t politics junkies and don’t have college degrees. But just do your best.
²Seriously, I will. There’s quite a bit of evidence to bring to bear on this, but it requires multiple thousands of words to explain. I’ve already written several thousand of those words, and when I’ve finished the rest of them you’ll be the first to know.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2509.02 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3715 days ago & DAD = 369 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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