The bad blood between Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner, the Time Warner CEO, started during the 1983 Sydney to Hobart sailing race. Just six miles from the finish, the Nirvana, an 80-foot sailing yacht sponsored by Murdoch, ran into Turner’s yacht, the 81-foot Condor, forcing it aground. After the race, a drunken and infuriated Turner challenged Murdoch to a fist fight, which he said could be broadcast live from Vegas.
That’s why, when Murdoch launched Fox News, a 24-hour news cable channel, as a competitor to Time Warner’s CNN on October 7, 1996, Turner said he was “looking forward to squashing Rupert like a bug.”
“Fox. New news. Coming. Soon.” Heavy metal music drops. “FOX NEWS,” the screen flashes. “It’s different.”
Fox News is now 30 years old. It was a revolution. American TV media had pretty much always had an old-fashioned, self-important formality to it. Iconic broadcasters like Walter Cronkite and Edward R Murrow presented straight to camera, the Voices of God. The facts – accuracy – were considered religiously paramount. They cared about things being true.
CNN, founded in 1980, was already well-established as the first 24-hour cable news network when Fox News came along, but it had inherited something of that Cronkite-Murrow-era stuffiness. There had been a few historical exceptions to all that high journalistic seriousness – ABC’s series of televised debates between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley in 1968, (the subject of the absolutely terrific film Best of Enemies) was perhaps the first example of TV news-as-entertainment, or even news-as-combat.
But Fox News took the concept to its logical, and absurd, conclusion. Murdoch, who had pioneered tabloid newspapers in the UK with his relaunch of the Sun – now imported the same sensibilities to American news TV. Bright colours, urgent breaking news “alerts,” constant visual stimuli – on 9/11 it became the first channel to run a constant news ticker at the bottom of the screen. The job of the host was no longer to dryly tell you the facts. On Fox, they told you how to feel.
And they want you to feel angry and afraid. Fox News was the pioneer of what came to be known as ragebait. Things like the idea of a liberal “war on Christmas”, an annual Fox News tradition dating back to a 2004 broadcast by their anchorman Bill O’Reilly. Or the idea that Barack Obama was racist against white people and wanted to impose sharia law.
It was wild, crazy and sometimes felt almost like self-parody. But the real-world consequences have been colossal. In April 2023, Fox News paid the largest public settlement by any American media company in history in a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion. Fox agreed to pay $787.5m to the voting equipment manufacturer following the 2020 election after claiming on air that Dominion’s systems were “rigged” against Trump.
By this point, Fox had gone far beyond the realms of anything resembling news. Bellowing at the camera about the “war on Christmas” was one thing, but spreading false claims about vote rigging in an attempt to overturn an election result was something completely different. It was more like propaganda.
The election denialism was just one of the weird fixations Fox developed in the Trump era, during which any number of loons have appeared on screen spouting bizarre theories about Covid, or non-existent waves of voter fraud sweeping the US, or about the white supremacist “great replacement” theory that white America is being purposefully replaced by people from ethnic minorities because they tend to vote Democrat. The Dominion fine didn’t slow down the crazy. No chance.
Even before social media, TV was drifting in this direction – anger and fear are the most powerful drivers of any kind of audience engagement. Fox didn’t discover or invent this: radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh had been moving in this direction before the TV station launched.
But the machine Rupert Murdoch built, with the help of his Fox henchman Roger Ailes, was of an order of magnitude more powerful than anything that had gone before. A 2017 study in the American Economic Review found that “watching the Fox News Channel for [an] additional 2.5 minutes per week increases the vote share of the Republican presidential candidate by 0.3 percentage points.” Other studies reported similar results.
Fox is the most divisive television station in history. It is perhaps also the most influential. No single organisation or individual, not even Trump himself, is more responsible for the calamitous ascendance of the US reactionary far right – and for every disaster that has followed. It is ground zero of the culture war.
Fox News was the end result of the realisation by a small number of extremely rich and powerful people, most especially Rupert Murdoch. What he understood was that the right was mad to try to compete with “liberal” ideas on an even playing field. The information ecosystem of the free internet was perceived as leaning leftward – so they would build a new ecosystem of their own. A closed one.
‘Fox is the most divisive television station in history. It is perhaps also the most infl uential. It is ground zero of theculture war’
From the beginning, the network’s slogan, “fair and balanced,” was provocatively ridiculous. There were straight-out news shows in the line-up in the early days, it’s true. But it was the primetime opinion programmes that powered the network’s growth and came to define its legacy. Roger Ailes was a former Republican strategist and NBC executive, and when Murdoch put him in charge of Fox News, he started building a roster of the biggest names in conservative media. Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Jesse Watters, Jeanine Pirro, Glenn Beck. And the biggest of them all: Bill O’Reilly.
The O’Reilly Report, later renamed The O’Reilly Factor, pioneered what is now the universal style of political talk TV, merging ranting talk radio and evangelical preacher-influenced rhetoric with paranoid, culture-war grievance politics. O’Reilly’s personality was as bombastic as his broadcast style. In one infamous incident (the outtake later leaked), he rants “FUCK IT, WE’LL DO IT LIVE” after rejecting a prepared script. It’s funny and ridiculous – but the sudden switch from incendiary fury to smooth, TV anchor mode gave an unsettling insight into the darker impulses that lurked behind the telegenic sheen.
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And he absolutely dominated the ratings. The O’Reilly Factor was the top-rated show on cable news for 16 years running, with a nightly audience that sometimes hit four million viewers.
By the beginning of the 2000 presidential election campaign of George W Bush v Al Gore, Fox News was available in 56m homes across the US. During the five-week Florida recount crisis that followed election night it underwent a monster 440% increase in viewers, by far the most of any news network. It was during the Bush era that followed that the network began to tighten its links with the Republican Party – partly by banging the drum loudest for the war in Iraq. In early 2002, Fox News’s ratings overtook CNN’s.
When Obama took office in 2009, Fox News entered its imperial phase. Glenn Beck, who joined as a talk show host that year, quickly became known for his lurid attacks on the new president, such as during a July 2009 appearance on the Fox & Friends morning show, when Beck called Obama “a racist” with “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” One afternoon, not long before the 2010 midterms, according to Ailes’s biographer Gabriel Sherman, Ailes told executives: “the network’s a success. We’re making a lot of money – that’s fine. But I want to elect the next president.”
Sherman’s book, released in 2014, contained allegations of sexual impropriety against Ailes, including that he had offered a producer a raise in exchange for sex. The company denied the claims. But two years later, former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Ailes, and the dam burst.
Dozens more women quickly came forward with similar stories, including Megyn Kelly, another star anchor. At the instruction of Rupert Murdoch, the parent company 21st Century Fox brought in New York law firm Paul, Weiss to conduct an independent inquiry into Ailes’s leadership. Ailes was given an ultimatum: resign, or be fired. On July 21, he resigned.
Ailes oversaw the creation of an intense, highly regimented workplace. One former Fox News producer, who spoke under condition of anonymity, said that unlike other newsrooms, the production staff have very little contact with the anchors. The teams are smaller per show than at other networks, and executive producers (EPs) could often be hard on staff, “bordering on unreasonable.” The producer called Fox News “a very toxic work environment.” Everyone “is just overworked and tired and mean.”
That said, though, “the biggest misconception,” they told me, was that there was some kind of daily memo from the higher-ups at Fox News pushing particular political talking points. “We had ratings meetings once a week,” the producer said, “and the only goal is: more eyes, fewer channel changes next meeting.”
There are ways in which the narrative gets massaged – but it’s much subtler than you might imagine. “We did have guidance the EPs would tell us, like subtly on things like not showing video of the Capitol,” as in the January 6 riot, the former producer told me. “Only stills. I don’t know… purely my own thought: it looked less bad in stills. [But] we were not at all told that was why.”
Leading up to the 2024 presidential election, the producer said: “we were told to lean into Democrats will ‘destroy’ Social Security.” But, “it felt like the higher-ups telling us things they believed, not like ‘lie to the people and tell them this’,” they said. “My feeling was the EPs themselves have no political agenda at all other than ‘move up within the company’.”
At some of the newer, upstart competitors, like online far right cable network Newsmax, the former Fox producer told me, “the people believe the schtick who work there. Fox, it’s very clear to me that they know their audience and are giving them what they want to hear… I am sure some people believe the line, but many do not and that’s not a requirement to work there.”
“Obviously, we were all aware we were working at Fox so that informed our pitches,” they said, “like, we aren’t stupid. But that’s how they become so… Fox News. Not because you’re being told. Like, the assignment is understood.”
‘It’s not that the line between the network and Trump is blurred. There is no line. It’s more like symbiosis’
As part of that “assignment”, the channel regularly boosted the Tea Party movement – a nascent right wing revolt within the GOP that would later evolve into the MAGA wing of the party when Trump started winning primaries in 2016. After assuming office, Trump created a “revolving door” between the Fox network and his White House; a Media Matters study found at least 20 Fox News staffers took jobs in the first administration.
After the Republicans lost the 2020 election, Fox News – by this point the top-rated cable network in America, with two and a half million primetime viewers – returned the favour, hiring former Trump staffers like secretary of state Mike Pompeo, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, or advisers Kellyanne Conway and Larry Kudlow as on-air talent.
This pattern has continued into Trump’s second term. He has appointed Fox News host “Judge” Jeanine Pirro as US attorney for Washington DC, Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, weekend host Dan Bongino as deputy FBI director and Fox News contributors Tulsi Gabbard, Janette Nesheiwat, Marty Makary, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Mike Huckabee, Sebastian Gorka, Tom Homan and Sean Duffy to be director of national intelligence, surgeon-general, FDA commissioner, ambassador to Greece, ambassador to Israel, deputy assistant to the president, border czar and secretary of transportation respectively.
And there are many more besides. Fox News star host Sean Hannity even campaigned directly for Trump, appearing with the now-president on stage at a rally on the eve of the midterm elections in Missouri in 2018. It’s not that the line between the network and Trump is blurred. There is no line. It’s more like symbiosis. Trump watches Fox News constantly, often phoning in from the White House. Stories on Fox News constantly turn into presidential decrees, often within minutes of broadcast.
Which may feel like the ultimate triumph. But in a way, Fox News has completed the political project for which it was built, which means that, now, it stands obsolete. It dominated the information ecosystem of cable TV, and pioneered the paranoid style of right wing media as it transitioned into the social media age. But now that transition is complete.
Fox News’s biggest stars, like Tucker Carlson, have left to become independent media operations in their own right. Carlson has almost six million YouTube followers. Ben Shapiro, another right wing influencer who has also hosted programmes on Fox, has almost seven. The far right is now a galaxy of digital stars with their own closed-off audiences, and while Fox News is still a powerful political force (especially while it continues to capture the president’s habitual constant attention), it is now only a part of that firmament.
The need for the right wing to control its own information ecosystem goes much further. The battlefield that was once just cable TV includes the takeover of what used to be Twitter by Elon Musk and the creation of other right wing social networks like Trump’s own Truth Social or the conservative YouTube alternative Rumble.
For three decades, it fundamentally set the tone for the generational takeover of American politics by the far right. It was the engine room of the Trump movement. Perhaps America’s lurch rightwards, its increasing polarisation, the rise of hyper-reactionary conservatism, would have happened anyway. But without Fox, it would not have happened to this extent.
The authors of the American Economic Review study cited earlier went on to estimate that “removing Fox News from cable television during the 2000 election cycle would have reduced the overall Republican presidential vote share by 0.46 percentage points”. That election, remember, hinged on a margin of 0.0009% in Florida, which triggered the fateful recount that ended with George W Bush in the White House.
“The predicted effect increases,” the authors add, “in 2004 and 2008 to 3.59 and 6.34 percentage points,” because of the channel’s increasing viewership. Six percentage points! And the “Fox News effect” trajectory continued, a 2024 study in the Journal of Public Economics found, through 2012, 2016, 2020, and beyond.
It is unclear now, as the MAGA movement fractures into warring tribes, whether Fox will align with one or other, and become some kind of mouthpiece for whatever rump faction ends up controlling the Republican Party post-Trump. Alternatively, it might just fade into irrelevance, and eventually get reabsorbed by the right wing content-generation morass it spawned – including a raft of global imitators like GB News.
But the damage is already, catastrophically, done. Look at the state of the world: it’s Fox News’s mess, and we’re all living in it.
