Turn on Fox News at almost any hour and you’ll see the same show. Democrats are destroying the country. Immigrants are dangerous. Protesters are paid. Whatever goes wrong under President Trump is somebody else’s fault. The faces change by time slot. The message doesn’t.
That’s not an accident. It’s the business model. Fox is the most-watched cable news network in America because anger keeps people watching, and it’s spent years turning the people it covers into villains for an audience it keeps afraid. Here’s what that looks like just this year.
What does Fox News cover every day?
Look at the Fox homepage on any given morning. On Thursday it ran headlines like “Sean Hannity: Mamdani’s hatred — or his wife’s hatred — knows no bounds,” a lawsuit accusing Dearborn, Michigan, of being “hostile to Christians and Jews,” and two separate stories going after Texas Democrat James Talarico. Story after story was about a Democrat, a Muslim or an immigrant you’re supposed to fear.
And there’s Minnesota. Fox has run segment after segment on Somali Minnesotans, with headlines like “Minnesota Senate hopeful warns threat level rising amid rash of Somali gang crime, terror plot.” Some of the crimes are real. Police have tied recent shootings to gangs, and an 18-year-old born in the United States is accused of plotting an attack on the Mall of America. But a white teenager’s crime doesn’t get reported as “white gang crime,” and a whole community doesn’t get put on trial for it. When Trump called Rep. Ilhan Omar and Somali immigrants “garbage” and said they should “go back to where they came from,” as NBC News reported, Fox’s own headlines framed it as Trump “ripping” the community and a spat with Gov. Tim Walz, not as a president insulting Americans over where they came from.
What did Greg Gutfeld say about Ilhan Omar?
On The Five in February, Greg Gutfeld turned a segment about Omar into a personal attack, according to a transcript. “She repulses me and I’m trying to find out why, because she’s not unattractive,” he said. “It’s… she has an unusual amount and kind of anger.” He said she should be “kissing the ground she walks on instead of spitting on it” in “the country who gave her corrupt ass a new life,” and that “if we find out that she screwed up on her immigration stuff, she’s got to go.”
Omar is a sitting member of Congress and a U.S. citizen. That’s a host on the network’s most-watched show calling a Black Muslim woman repulsive and talking about getting rid of her. It isn’t commentary on her votes. It’s a show about who belongs.
What happened with JD Vance and Angie Nixon?
Fox spent weeks covering Florida Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon as a dangerous socialist, from Hannity in August to segments with her opponent, Sen. Ashley Moody. Then on October 1, at a campaign stop in Lakeland, Vice President JD Vance took it where that coverage was always heading. “When Angie Nixon calls herself a socialist, I think the right response is to say, ‘Then get the hell out of here. You don’t belong in America,'” he said, the Florida Phoenix reported.
Vance said it at a rally, not on Fox. But it’s the same idea Fox puts on air every night: Americans who disagree with you aren’t opponents, they’re intruders. Nixon, who is Black, answered on CBS Miami that her ancestors helped build this country. “I’m not going any damn place,” she said.
What has Lawrence Jones said on Fox & Friends?
Fox & Friends sets the tone for the network’s day, and co-host Lawrence Jones is one of its loudest voices. In the Cornell rape case, where seven young men are accused of assaulting a student, Jones said on air: “I wanna be sensitive to Jane Doe, but we know the identities of these males now. At some point, we have to hear from Jane Doe… That’s the only way this is fair and proper.” Even some Fox viewers called it an “awful take”. Pushing a woman who says she was raped to give up her anonymity, when she was already getting threats, isn’t fairness.
Jones has also been open about how he sees the job. “It is really us,” he said in one rant about media bias, Mediaite reported. “Fox against everyone else.” That’s the whole network in one line. You’re either with Fox or you’re the enemy.
Are protesters really paid?
It’s one of Fox’s favorite lines. When people protest ICE, Trump or anything else, someone on Fox says they’re paid. In January, Fox contributor Paul Mauro called agitation “a career path for a lot of people in today’s left,” with people “drawing salaries” funded by taxpayers, Media Matters documented. When Trump made the same claim about Minneapolis protesters, PolitiFact rated it False. There was no evidence. The point of the claim isn’t to inform you. It’s to tell you the people in the street don’t really mean it, so you don’t have to listen.
Why should anyone trust Fox News?
Remember this: in 2023, Fox paid $787.5 million to settle Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit, NPR reported, after court filings showed hosts privately doubted the stolen-election claims the network kept airing. That’s not opinion. Fox knew what it put on air wasn’t true and kept putting it on because the audience wanted it.
The same pattern runs through its defense of Trump today. A bad jobs number, high gas prices, a court loss: on Fox, it’s always the Democrats, the judges or the “radical left.” History gets rewritten in real time, and the people doing it call themselves patriots.
The BeezLoop Take
This isn’t about the people who watch Fox. Millions of them are regular folks who want to hear their side get a fair shake, and plenty of them are our neighbors, coworkers and family. The problem is what the network sells them. Fox makes its money by keeping people angry at other Americans: Somali families in Minneapolis, a Black woman running for Senate in Florida, protesters, Democrats, the press.
That’s not patriotism. Patriotism is believing your fellow Americans belong here even when you disagree with them. A network that tells its audience every hour that half the country is the enemy isn’t defending America. It’s dividing it, and cashing the checks.
The open question is for the viewers. If you watch Fox every day, ask yourself what you learned that you can actually use, and how much of it was just someone telling you who to be mad at.
Also on BeezLoop: How Fox hosts handled the Cornell rape case, Stephen A. Smith’s Lane Johnson “misunderstanding”, and what a new poll shows about Latino voters and ICE.
Sources: Florida Phoenix · CBS News Miami · Crooks and Liars (Gutfeld on The Five) · AOL (Lawrence Jones, Cornell case) · NBC News (threats to Jane Doe) · Mediaite · Fox News · NBC News (Trump on Somalis) · PolitiFact · Media Matters · NPR (Dominion settlement) · The Economic Times
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