The Biggest Scandals To Hit Fox News

Bias is human. However, journalistic standards demand a certain level of objectivity regarding facts. If you're a news anchor, your opinion on any politician and/or organization must take a backseat to the objective reality regarding whether they are corrupt, authoritarian, sleazy, or so on. Fox News doesn't play by those rules. Instead, the network chooses its conclusion (GOP: good, Dems: bad), and either cherry-picks information or outright lies to get there, creating a conservative echo chamber that has deepened polarization across the U.S., as explained by the Guardian, and ripped families apart. Over the years, Fox's irresponsible promotion of inaccuracies and constant pro-GOP flag-waving (regardless of the issue) has fueled many baseless theories and misconceptions, while making the network itself increasingly powerful. As once said by David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox."

This problem has worsened in recent years, as seen by the weird relationship that President Trump has with the daytime show Fox & Friends. Regardless of what one thinks about Trump, or Fox, the fact is that it's wildly unprofessional how Fox & Friends works tirelessly to rewrite factual events to better suit the president's needs, knowing that he's watching and purposely giving him talking points to try to deflect current scandals, as the New Yorker assesses. 

Back in 2008, Media Matters reported that an episode of Fox & Friends had attempted to smear the reputations of a New York Times reporter and editor, Jacques Steinberg and Steven Reddicliffe, respectively, by doctoring their photos to make their teeth yellower, enlarge their noses, put dark circles beneath their eyes, and in the case of Reddicliffe, lengthen his forehead to give the appearance of a more deeply receded hairline. See the picture above? Yes, this was as childish as it sounded, and yes, it erupted in a flood of criticism toward Fox News ... but seriously, even putting aside the obvious breach of ethics involved here, to say nothing of the offensiveness, it's also hard to fathom how a company worth billions could've created such amateurish photoshops and tried to pass them off as real. Your 11-year-old nephew could've done a better job in MS-Paint.

Sadly, Fox News never learns a lesson. The following year, Fox got caught in a slightly different (but equally sleazy) scandal involving misrepresented footage, according to the Los Angeles Times, when Sean Hannity tried to claim that over 20,000 people had attended a Michelle Bachman rally (in reality, there had been 5,000-to-10,000 attendees), and he used footage from an entirely different protest as "evidence." Luckily, Jon Stewart caught him in the act, and Hannity was forced into a half-hearted apology, according to the Nation, wherein he blamed it on oversight.

Climate change is real. So are the dangers posed by COVID-19. Fox News, though, has violently contradicted the science regarding both of these realities, with deadly results.

As far as climate change, there is a 97 percent consensus among scientists regarding humankind's role in the climate horrors being wrought. Nonetheless, as the Guardian points out, Fox News has gone out of its way to disproportionately interview "skeptical" experts on screen, or to give airtime to non-experts bankrolled by fossil fuel corporations. In 2019, Public Citizen tracked that 87 percent of Fox News' climate coverage was devoted to climate denialism, putting out long-debunked conspiracy theories even as literal catastrophes ravaged the globe.

The same is true of COVID-19. In early 2020, the Guardian reported that Fox News aggressively downplayed the threat posed by the novel coronavirus, putting out misleading and/or false information, comparing it to a bad cold, and other lies which likely played a huge role in the U.S.'s horrendously failed response to the pandemic. In fact, a University of Chicago study cited by NPR looked at Fox News viewers, and found a direct link between those who watched Sean Hannity's program, which went out of its way to downplay the threat, and increased COVID-19 cases. By April 2020, Fox News' efforts to label COVID-19 a "hoax" resulted in a lawsuit, according to Forbes.

Behind the scenes, Fox News hosts plenty of weird soap operas. One particularly messy spat went public in 2010, when Murdoch's son-in-law, Matthew Freud (what a name to have during a family squabble, huh?) told the New York Times that he was ashamed of being connected to his father-in-law's news network, stating that, "I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes's horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder, and every other global media business aspires to." Ouch. Following this pointed statement, Elisabeth, Murdoch's daughter, told the Guardian that her husband had "gone rogue" with his comment, but it's worth noting that, surprisingly enough, Elisabeth was also a Barack Obama supporter (and fundraiser!). Murdoch's company, for its part, issued a cold statement saying Freud's views had nothing to do with Murdoch's. 

This wouldn't be the end of the Fox family drama, however. In 2019, the mogul's own son, James Murdoch, told Vanity Fair that he thought his father's network was destroying the "connective tissue" of society, and expressed interest in funding his own liberal media outlet to compete with Fox. James Murdoch, for the record, donated to the Pete Buttigieg presidential campaign. 

Tucker Carlson is no stranger to controversy, as Business Insider reports, whether it involves him making racist comments, sexist comments, or downplaying the very real dangers of white supremacy. One peak moment of unpleasantness, though, occurred in 2019, when he attempted to interview Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, the author of Utopia for Realists, a book which touts the benefits of a universal base income. Bregman, as you might recall, was the leftist firebrand who went viral when he told wealthy attendees at Davos that when it came to saving the planet, they needed to have their taxes raised, instead of just talking about philanthropy. For some reason, Carlson thought he and Bregman would connect ... but he clearly hadn't read Bregman's book, and according to Vox, the whole thing went horrendously for the Fox News host. Bregman didn't hold back in telling Carlson that he was a "millionaire funded by billionaires," and "part of the problem," until eventually, Bregman's straightforwardness sent Carlson ballistic, spewing NSFW expletives and insults at Bregman. The whole thing made Carlson look fairly childish, and he had no intent on airing it, but Bregman made sure that it went viral all 'round the Twittersphere.

Carlson eventually apologized for the profanity, according to Business Insider, but not the message behind it, saying it was sincere. Which is ... not a sincere apology, to be clear, and reeks of something the higher-ups might've demanded from, you know, a millionaire funded by billionaires.

Leaked emails are probably the most recurring scandals of the 21st century, and Fox News had its own "Emailgate" (to use Fox News-style terminology) back in 2010, according to Media Matters, when private messages from the network's managing editor and VP Bill Sammon were made public, revealing just how intentionally Sammon wanted to slant the news. 

To summarize, the emails showed that Sammon was aggressively ordering staff to take a hard right on the issue of healthcare reform, through subversive tactics such as referring to the "public option" (I.E., the actual term) as a "government option" to play into Tea Party resentment and scare people away from it. The propaganda didn't stop there, however. Other emails, as reported by the Benton Institute, showed that back in 2008, Sammon was trying to muddy then-Senator Barack Obama by highlighting a past relationship with a white woman (basically, to inflame racist viewers), and to equate Obama's political views with Marxism. Sammon's emails also showed him urging staffers to employ climate change denialism, via Politico, facetious arguing that climate science had been "called into question" (it hadn't) and asserting that, in his words, "It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies."

Despite this scandal, Sammon is still with the network.

While no one can dispute the success of Fox News as a franchise, there's also no disputing that the news channel's reputation is ... well, not good, and in 2017, NPR reported that Fox News' problematic history was causing a real headache for owner Rupert Murdoch's other business arrangements.

At the time, Murdoch was trying to purchase full control of the European broadcasting company Sky, which is an active media empire running across Europe. Murdoch's buyout efforts were already hamstrung by the sexual harassment scandals hitting Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly, but also by a lower profile controversy involving supermarket floor decals and Chris Christie (loooong story), and the fact that a previous attempt to take over Sky, six years prior, had been blocked by a parliamentary inquiry, 100 civil lawsuits, widespread bribery, and phone hacking.

Wondering how it all ended? In 2018, Murdoch won government clearance to take over Sky, according to the Guardian, but later that year, he sold all the shares to Comcast, the world's most hated company.