Fair and Balanced™: The Most Trusted Name in Entertainment

There’s a courtroom exchange that should be carved into the base of every satellite dish in America. In 2020, a former Playboy model sued Fox News for defamation over something Tucker Carlson said on air. Fox’s lawyers did not argue that Carlson told the truth. They argued — and I need you to sit down for this — that no “reasonable viewer” takes what Carlson says as fact, because he engages in “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary” [1]. A federal judge agreed, ruling the statements were “rhetorical hyperbole” that no reasonable person would treat as “stating actual facts,” and tossed the case [2].

Fox won. That was their victory: a federal court accepting, at the network’s own urging, that the most-watched program on the most-watched cable news channel in America is not a source of facts. The 3-plus million people watching every night believed they were watching news. The network’s own attorneys, under oath and on the record, said otherwise — and banked the win.

That’s the thesis of this piece, and I want to be precise about it, because precision is exactly what they’re allergic to: Fox News is not a news organization that sometimes gets things wrong. It is an entertainment and political-influence operation that wears news as a costume — and we don’t have to speculate about that, because it keeps telling us so, in court, under penalty of perjury, where lying actually costs something.

The receipts, Your Honor

Start with the big one. In April 2023, Fox paid $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems — the largest known media defamation settlement in American history — to avoid a trial over its broadcasts claiming Dominion rigged the 2020 election [3]. As part of the settlement, Fox acknowledged the court’s ruling that it had broadcast false statements about the company [3][4].

But the number isn’t even the damning part. The damning part is what discovery dragged into the daylight: the private texts and emails showing that Fox’s biggest stars and executives knew the election-fraud story was garbage while they aired it. Rupert Murdoch himself called the stolen-election claims “really crazy” — as his network fed those very claims to millions of viewers, night after night [3][4]. They didn’t get fooled. They knew. The audience was the only party in the building not in on it.

And Dominion isn’t a one-off. Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation suit over the same election lies is still grinding toward trial as of this writing — a New York appeals court has already ruled Fox Corporation itself must face it [5][6]. In 2020, Fox settled with the family of Seth Rich, the murdered DNC staffer whose death the network spun into a WikiLeaks conspiracy so baseless Fox retracted the story within a week — after it had already metastasized. The FBI, the intelligence community, and the Mueller investigation all concluded the claim was false; Russian military intelligence hacked those emails [7]. The Rich family had to bury their son twice: once in the ground, and once under two years of primetime ghoul-content.

Count it up. One record-shattering settlement with an acknowledgment of broadcast falsehoods. One multi-billion-dollar suit pending. One settlement over a conspiracy theory inflicted on a grieving family. And one court victory premised on the argument that their flagship show isn’t factual. Any local newspaper with that record would be a smoking crater. Fox called it a business expense and kept the cameras rolling.

The product isn’t information. Look at the data.

Here’s where it stops being an outrage story and becomes a public-health one. If Fox were merely biased, its viewers would know the basic facts with a rightward lean. That’s not what the research finds. It finds something stranger and far worse: watching Fox exclusively is associated with knowing less than watching nothing at all.

Fairleigh Dickinson University tested current-events knowledge across media diets. People who consumed no news whatsoever answered more questions correctly than people who watched only Fox News — and the result held after controlling for party affiliation, so this isn’t just “Republicans watch Fox” [8][9]. Let that one breathe: the network’s exclusive viewers would have been better informed if the channel had never existed. The empty chair beat the anchor desk.

And it’s not new. Back in 2003, a University of Maryland (PIPA) study measured public misperceptions about the Iraq war — whether WMDs had been found, whether Saddam was tied to al-Qaeda, whether the world backed the invasion. Eighty percent of Fox viewers held at least one false belief, the worst of any outlet measured — three times more likely than the next nearest network to hold all three — against 27% for NPR/PBS audiences [10]. Twenty years, two entirely different subjects, same signature. That’s not a bad news team having a rough decade. That’s the product working as designed.

January 6, in two channels

If you want the perfect specimen of the whole enterprise, it’s January 6, 2021 — a day Fox’s stars broadcast on two frequencies at once.

On the private one, as the Capitol was being sacked, Laura Ingraham texted Trump’s chief of staff: “Mark, the President needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home… He is destroying his legacy.” Brian Kilmeade: “Please get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished.” Sean Hannity: “Can he make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol” [11]. They knew exactly who the mob was and exactly whose mob it was.

On the public one — the one you were allowed to hear — Ingraham mused that same night that the rioters were “antithetical to the MAGA movement” and floated that antifa “may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd” [12]. Private channel: our guys are destroying everything, make it stop. Broadcast channel: probably leftists. Same day. Same people. One truth for the powerful, one product for you.

State media, with commercial breaks

“State media” used to be an insult you had to argue for. Now it’s a staffing chart. When this administration took office, it tapped 19 Fox pundits, personalities, and producers for the second term on day one [13] — a number that kept climbing past twenty as the network’s greenroom emptied into the federal government [14]. The Secretary of Defense is a former Fox & Friends Weekend host. The Transportation Secretary hosted on Fox Business. The Director of National Intelligence was a Fox pundit. The deputy director of the FBI, a Fox regular. A Fox host became the capital’s interim top prosecutor [13][14]. The pipeline doesn’t run between the network and the party anymore; the network is a hiring hall.

And none of this is a corruption of the founder’s vision — it is the founder’s vision. Fox News was built in 1996 by Roger Ailes, a career Republican media operative who ran television strategy for Nixon, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush before he ever ran a newsroom. Don’t take my word for it; that’s from Fox’s own obituary of the man [15]. The network wasn’t a news channel that drifted partisan. It was a partisan project that bought a news costume — and the costume is now threadbare enough that they’ll say so in court whenever it saves them money.

My read: the fear is the business model

Here’s the opinion part, clearly labeled as such, because unlike some networks I distinguish between the two. I don’t think Fox is failing its audience. I think it’s serving its owners — a small club of extremely wealthy men whose interests are tax cuts, deregulation, and a voter base too frightened and too misinformed to notice it keeps voting against its own paycheck. Fear is the product line: the migrant caravan, the antifa phantom, the war on Christmas, the trans panic du jour. A scared viewer is a loyal viewer, a loyal viewer is a reliable voter, and a reliable voter who knows less than someone who watches no news at all [8] is the single most valuable asset in American politics. You don’t build that machine by accident, and you don’t run it for a quarter-century by accident either — not when the internal mail shows the operators privately laughing at the very stories they’re selling [4].

And the cruelest part is who pays for it. Not the elites who run it — the viewers. The retiree convinced the election was stolen because the people he trusted knew better and said it anyway [4]. The family fed a murdered kid as content [7]. The base of a once-serious party, marinated in grievance until any Republican who tells them the truth is a traitor to it. Fox didn’t just poison the discourse. It poisoned its own side first — which is why I say it’s the bane of the Republican party, not its friend. A party that no longer permits its voters to know true things has no immune system left. Ask the fourteen entries on our Fascism Watch how that tends to end — controlled mass media isn’t on that list by coincidence.

The reasonable viewer

So let’s give Fox’s lawyers the last word, since they’re the only people in the building under oath. Their argument, accepted by a federal court, is that the reasonable viewer doesn’t believe what Fox’s stars say [1][2].

Be the reasonable viewer. That’s it. That’s the whole prescription, and it comes straight from the defendant. Treat the channel as what its own attorneys say it is — entertainment — and get your facts where facts are still a liability if they’re wrong: the wire services, the fact-checkers, the outlets that show their work. We keep a list on our front page, and not one entry on it has ever had to pay three-quarters of a billion dollars for lying to you.

The most trusted name in news told a courtroom you’d be unreasonable to trust it. For once — believe them.

References

[1] “You Literally Can’t Believe The Facts Tucker Carlson Tells You. So Say Fox’s Lawyers.” NPR, September 29, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-believe-the-facts-tucker-carlson-tells-you-so-say-fox-s-lawye

[2] “Judge tosses suit over Trump affair story after Fox News argues no ‘reasonable viewer’ takes Tucker Carlson seriously.” CBS News, September 2020. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-tosses-suit-trump-affair-story-fox-news-tucker-carlson/

[3] “Fox News settles blockbuster defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems.” NPR, April 18, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/18/1170339114/fox-news-settles-blockbuster-defamation-lawsuit-with-dominion-voting-systems

[4] “Fox News settles with Dominion at the last second, pays more than $787 million to avert defamation trial over its 2020 election lies.” CNN Business, April 18, 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/media/fox-dominion-settlement/index.html

[5] “Judge to decide whether Fox News will face Smartmatic at trial.” NPR, December 2, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/02/nx-s1-5627506/fox-news-smartmatic-lawsuit-election-claims-trial

[6] “Fox Corp. must face Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation suit.” NBC News, February 2024. https://www.nbcnews.com/media/fox-corp-smartmatics-defamation-suit-rcna135619

[7] “Fox News Settles With Seth Rich’s Parents For False Story Claiming Clinton Leaks.” NPR, November 24, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/11/24/938545344/fox-news-settles-with-seth-richs-parents-for-false-story-claiming-clinton-leaks

[8] “Does Watching Fox News Make You Less Informed?” Slate, January 2014. https://slate.com/business/2014/01/does-watching-fox-news-make-you-less-informed.html

[9] “Study: Watching Fox News Actually Makes You Less Informed.” Rolling Stone, 2012. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/study-watching-fox-news-actually-makes-you-stupid-235770/

[10] Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay, Evan Lewis. “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War.” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 118, no. 4, Winter 2003–04 (PIPA/Knowledge Networks). https://publicconsultation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/PSQ_Winter_2003-04_Misperceptions_article_15017.pdf

[11] “WATCH: Rep. Cheney reads texts sent by Fox hosts to Mark Meadows on Jan. 6.” PBS News, December 13, 2021. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-rep-cheney-reads-texts-sent-by-fox-hosts-to-mark-meadows-on-jan-6

[12] “Compare and Contrast: Fox News Anchors’ Frantic Jan 6. Texts to Mark Meadows vs. What They Told Viewers.” Rolling Stone, December 2021. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/hannity-ingraham-kilmeade-fox-news-texts-on-air-1271349/

[13] “Fox News to Trump’s White House: new president taps 19 people with network ties.” NPR, January 20, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/01/20/nx-s1-5268791/fox-news-trump-inauguration

[14] “Full List of Fox News Personalities Serving in Donald Trump Administration.” Newsweek, 2025. https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-fox-news-personalities-serving-donald-trump-administration-2070560

[15] “Roger Ailes, founder of Fox News, dead at 77.” Fox News, May 18, 2017. https://www.foxnews.com/us/roger-ailes-founder-of-fox-news-dead-at-77