Fox News

• 1. Introduction

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  Fox News Channel went on the air on the 7th of October 1996, reaching 17 million households at launch. It was absent from the two largest American media markets, New York City and Los Angeles, and had to pay cable systems up to $11 per subscriber just to get carried. That was the opposite of how television distribution normally worked. The questions worth asking are: how did a channel that started from such a weak position become the most-watched cable news network in the United States? Who built it, what were they trying to build, and what did it become?

• 2. Rupert Murdoch's Blueprint

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  In May 1985, Rupert Murdoch announced a plan to build a fourth broadcast force in American television, purchasing six Metromedia stations alongside industrialist and philanthropist Marvin Davis. Murdoch was Australian-born and had become an American citizen in part to satisfy U.S. ownership laws. He already had experience with around-the-clock news: his News Corporation subsidiary BSkyB had launched Sky News in the United Kingdom in 1989, Europe's first 24-hour news channel.

  By the 30th of January 1996, Murdoch announced that News Corp. would launch a cable news channel as part of a worldwide Fox platform. He framed the appetite for news as expanding, saying people wanted news that explained how events affected them directly. The commercial case was clear to him, but so was the ideological one. The channel was created to appeal to a conservative audience, and Murdoch later described it as giving room to a side of the debate that, in his view, had previously been underrepresented on television.

  In February 1996, Murdoch approached Roger Ailes, a former Republican Party political strategist and NBC executive who had just left the cable channel America's Talking. Ailes accepted, and demanded five months of 14-hour workdays plus several weeks of rehearsal broadcasts before the channel went live. The flagship newscast at launch was The Schneider Report, featuring Mike Schneider's fast-paced delivery. Evening opinion programming included The O'Reilly Report, The Crier Report, and Hannity and Colmes. Graphics were designed to be colorful and to convey the main points even without sound, with on-screen text and bullet points.

• 3. The Rise to Dominance

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  In January 2002, Fox News surpassed CNN in cable news ratings for the first time. That shift followed a period of aggressive expansion throughout the late 1990s and a significant boost during the 11th of September 2001 attacks, when Fox News was the first news organization to run a continuous news ticker at the bottom of the screen to handle the volume of incoming information.

  In 2003, during the opening stages of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the channel saw a roughly 300% increase in viewership, averaging 3.3 million viewers daily at the height of the conflict. The following year, its ratings for the Republican National Convention exceeded those of NBC, ABC, and CBS combined. During President George W. Bush's address alone, Fox News drew 7.3 million viewers nationally, while the three broadcast networks drew 5.9 million, 5.1 million, and 5.0 million respectively.

  By September 2018-87 million U.S. households, representing 91% of television subscribers, could receive Fox News. In 2019 the channel averaged 2.5 million viewers in prime time, making it the top-rated cable network overall. The first quarter of 2020 became the highest-rated quarter in the network's history, with a prime-time average audience of 3.387 million viewers. Sean Hannity's program averaged 4.2 million viewers that quarter, topping not only cable news competitors but also broadcast competition in the same time slot. By the end of that quarter, Fox had held the top-rated position in cable for 45 consecutive months.

  As of 2023, the channel generates approximately 70% of its parent company Fox Corporation's pre-tax profit.

• 4. The "Fair and Balanced" Question

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  Roger Ailes coined the slogan "Fair and Balanced" while the network was being established. A New York Times description called it a blunt signal that Fox News planned to counteract what Ailes and others saw as a liberal bias in establishment television. In a 2013 interview, Murdoch defended the phrase, saying the channel featured just as many Democrats as Republicans.

  In August 2003, Fox News sued comedian Al Franken over his use of the phrase as a subtitle for his book critical of the channel. Judge Denny Chin dismissed the lawsuit three days later, calling the case wholly without merit and suggesting Fox News's trademark on the phrase could itself be invalid.

  In December 2003, a different legal challenge from AlterNet sought to cancel Fox News's trademark on the slogan with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, citing Robert Greenwald's documentary film Outfoxed as supporting evidence. AlterNet withdrew the petition after losing early motions. Fox News quietly dropped "Fair and Balanced" in August 2016, shifting to "Most Watched, Most Trusted." A network executive said the change had nothing to do with programming or editorial decisions; media observers speculated it was an effort to distance the channel from Ailes, who had left under controversy. By March 2018, the network introduced the campaign Real News. Real Honest Opinion, explicitly framing the opinion programming as a selling point rather than a liability.

• 5. The Political Machine

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  Prior to 2000, academic research found that Fox News lacked an ideological tilt and was watched by more Democrats than Republicans. That shifted markedly during the 2004 presidential election, when Fox News provided distinctly hostile coverage of Democratic nominee John Kerry, including heavy amplification of the Swift Boat campaign. A 2007 study using the introduction of Fox News into local markets as a research variable found that in the 2000 election, Republicans gained between 0.4 and 0.7 percentage points in towns that began broadcasting Fox News.

  A 2004 documentary, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, featured clips and internal memos from editorial vice president John Moody directing staff on how to frame certain subjects. Four people identified as former employees said Fox News made them slant the news toward conservatives. A leaked memo from Fox News vice president Bill Sammon instructed news staff to use the term "government-run health insurance" rather than "public option" in health care coverage, sent shortly after Republican pollster Frank Luntz had explained to Sean Hannity on-air that framing determined whether voters supported or opposed the policy.

  By 2016, the channel had shifted solidly toward Donald Trump. For Trump's first term in office, nearly 20 current and former Fox News hosts received administrative and cabinet-level positions in his administration; his second term included 23 current and former Fox News hosts appointed or nominated. A 2017 study found Fox News increases Republican vote shares by 0.3 points among viewers induced into watching an additional 2.5 minutes per week, a figure that led one political communication scholar to write that conventional wisdom may be greatly underestimating Fox's significance as a factor in American politics.

  In March 2019, The New Yorker reported that Fox News.com reporter Diana Falzone had the story of the Stormy Daniels-Donald Trump scandal before the 2016 election, but that a Fox News executive told her the story would not run because Rupert Murdoch wanted Trump to win. The executive who acknowledged making the decision to not publish said he had not run it past Ailes or others, but denied it was to protect Trump.

• 6. Conspiracy Theories and False Claims

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  Over nearly four years following the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, ten official investigations, including six by Republican-controlled House committees, found no evidence of scandal, cover-up, or lying by Obama administration officials. Fox News ran 1,098 segments on the subject during the twenty months after the attack alone, including 281 segments alleging a cover-up and 100 segments falsely suggesting the administration had issued a stand-down order to prevent a rescue.

  From 2015 through 2018, Fox News broadcast extensive coverage of an alleged scandal surrounding the sale of uranium company Uranium One to Russian interests, with host Sean Hannity calling it one of the biggest scandals in American history. In November 2017, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith went on air to directly debunk the Uranium One narrative. Hannity later called Smith "clueless," while Smith stated publicly: "I get it, that some of our opinion programming is there strictly to be entertaining. I get that. I don't work there. I wouldn't work there."

  On the 16th of May 2017, on a day when most news organizations were covering Donald Trump's disclosure of classified information to Russia, Fox News led with a story about a private investigator's uncorroborated claims linking a murdered DNC staffer, Seth Rich, to WikiLeaks. The family of Seth Rich, the Washington D.C. police, the mayor's office, and the FBI all rebuked the claims. Fox News retracted the story seven days after publishing it, saying it did not meet the network's standards. The investigator later told CNN that he had no evidence Rich had contacted WikiLeaks and that he had learned of the alleged evidence's possible existence from a Fox News reporter.

  Fox News's Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, in leaked emails from 2009, instructed journalists to dispute the scientific consensus on climate change and to avoid asserting that the planet had warmed or cooled without immediately noting that the underlying data had been questioned. Climate scientist Michael E. Mann stated that Fox News had constructed a framework in which the greenhouse effect is treated as a myth and climate change as a hoax. In 2019, a Fox News report falsely claimed new research showed Earth might be heading toward a new Ice Age; the researcher whose study was cited stated publicly that Fox News had utterly misrepresented the work.

• 7. Succession and Ownership

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  Rupert Murdoch served as executive chairman of Fox Corporation from 2016 onward. In 2023, he announced he would step down and hand responsibilities to his son Lachlan, though the succession became legally contested. That same year, The Economist reported that Murdoch had abandoned a plan to remerge News Corporation with Fox after the proposal met resistance from investors who considered Fox News a toxic brand.

  In September 2025, Lachlan Murdoch secured control of Fox News, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal through a renegotiated trust in a deal valued at $3.3 billion. The terms of the new trust were described as ensuring the channel's conservative editorial direction until the trust's expiration in 2050. Suzanne Scott has served as CEO of Fox News since 2018, the position Roger Ailes had held since the channel's founding in 1996.

  The channel broadcasts from studios at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan, shares its headquarters with the Fox Business Network, and maintains Washington D.C. studios on Capitol Hill in a building shared with NBC News and C-SPAN. Fox News provides service to 86 countries and territories. In March 2024, Fox remained the most-watched news network in total day and prime-time viewers, with 2.135 million viewers in prime time against MSNBC's 1.307 million and CNN's 601,000 in the same daypart.