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Key links:
Primary website:
foxnews.com
Primary Twitter:
@foxnews

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

Fox News Channel is an American cable news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Since 2002, Fox News has been the highest-rated of America’s three primary cable news networks, ahead of MSNBC and CNN. Its audience size peaked in 2009, though it remains well ahead of its competitors. It earned $534.8 million in profits in 2009, up 19 percent from the previous year, and higher than either CNN or MSNBC.

Fox News has a staff of about 1,200 in about 20 bureaus. It launched the Fox Business Network, a cable news channel, in 2007.

Its best-known personalities include Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Shepard Smith, Mike Huckabee, and Greta Van Susteren.

Fox was founded in 1996 by Roger Ailes (who remains its head) and Rupert Murdoch as an antidote to what they saw as the mainstream media’s ideological and political bias.

Over the past decade, Fox has increasingly moved into opinion and analysis, in addition to news and original reporting. Fox is generally understood to have a conservative political outlook, something that has brought it both praise and criticism, the latter including accusations of being a mouthpiece of the Republican Party, as well as accusations of poor journalism. It has hired numerous current politicians as news analysts.

Recent surveys have found that Fox News is viewed as both the most trusted and most ideological of television news networks, with a sharp partisan divide on each issue.

Fox was among the 10 largest American news sites on the web as of April 2011, though its online audience is smaller than CNN’s or MSNBC’s.

In the mid-2000s, Fox’s site ranked relatively low in user interactivity, but Fox’s citizen journalism project uReport was launched in 2007 and became a partnership with News Corp.’s social network MySpace in 2009. In 2009, Fox launched the community-based political analysis site Fox Nation.

Fox News’ iPhone app was the most downloaded free iPhone news app in 2010, and it launched a free iPad app in June 2011.

Peers, allies, & competitors:
Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
April 24, 2023 / Joshua Benton
Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News, and what matters is why — It was only 48 hours ago that The New York Times was saying we shouldn’t expect much change in how Fox News operates to come out of its $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. The model — conserva...
March 23, 2023 / Mark Jacob
Why journalism schools won’t quit Fox News — Fox News appears to have committed a gross breach of journalism ethics: intentionally lying to its audience about the 2020 election. This appalls many people in America’s journalism schools. But interviews with three p...
May 25, 2021 / Ryan Burge
White evangelicals watch Fox News; Hindus and Muslims are more likely to watch CNN — Fox News possesses an “outsized influence” on the American public, especially among religious viewers. That was the conclusion of the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute in a report released just after t...
April 21, 2021 / Joshua Benton
No, Americans haven’t abandoned journalism values like transparency and oversight — A few months ago, a group of researchers was interested in finding out whether or not Americans supported what they considered five “core journalism values.” So they surveyed 2,727 Americans and asked whether...
March 23, 2021 / Hanaa' Tameez
Fox News appeals to a diverse viewership, while Newsmax and OAN tend to attract older, white men — Fox News reaches nearly half of American adults and over 60 percent of Republican-leaning adults, according to a new Pew Research Center report. The study surveyed 12,045 American adults between March 8 and March 14, 202...

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Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: March 27, 2014.
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PolitiFact is a fact-checking website that examines the statements made by American political figures and pundits. It is run by the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times). PolitiFact was launched in 2007, a project of longtime political reporter Bill Adair (who left the site in 2013) and web developer Matt Waite. According to Waite,…

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