The Stories Fox News Doesn’t Cover
In an alternate reality, what’s left out can matter as much as what’s made up.
This is a subscriber-exclusive edition of Wait, What?, a newsletter about politics, the far right, and the things you should be noticing. Sign up for the newsletter here, and subscribe to The Atlantic for access to more exclusives like this.
If a story doesn’t run on Fox, will Fox viewers even know it happened? While it may be true that liberals and conservatives each live in their own news bubble, Fox has created an alternative universe where all American cities are burning dystopian hellscapes and Democrats are just itching to give your stuff to immigrants unless you “save America” and vote Republican. The brand has long relied on fake controversies (for example, Barack Obama’s “terrorist fist jab”), and few are able to make sense of Tucker Carlson’s breathless coverage of “gypsies,” and M&Ms becoming “less sexy.” There are the more nefarious stories, like their coverage of the Seth Rich murder case, which ended with Fox settling with Rich’s parents (according to NPR’s David Folkenflik, “Neither side disclosed whether Fox had made a payment to the Riches or had apologized to them”).
Sometimes Fox obsessively covers stories that clearly fit the Republican Party’s agenda. Before the 2018 midterms, the network devoted a ton of time to a migrant caravan nearing the Mexican border. Republicans, meanwhile, were running on racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, and this coverage helped them make the case that outsiders were massing at the border. After the election, Fox largely cut its coverage of the caravan.
But what about the stories that don’t make it on air?
Speaking last Friday at a gathering of the Federalist Society, former Vice President Mike Pence disavowed (about 13 months late) Donald Trump’s plan to have him overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, saying, “President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.” The next day, I noticed this tweet from CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy: “Per transcripts, Fox has not covered Mike Pence rebuking Trump at all today. None of the channel’s prime time shows covered it last night either.”
I asked Darcy to share his views on what Fox does and does not choose to cover. “When stories are politically inconvenient for Fox, the network simply ignores them and leaves its viewers in the dark,” he told me. “Instead of informing viewers with news that might collide with their worldviews, Fox creates a safe space for its audience. It is a contemptible move for a channel that purports to be in the news business. But it makes sense when you consider that, at its heart, Fox is actually a right-wing talk channel—one that primarily seeks to reinforce the ideology of its viewers because it is terrified of alienating them and hurting its bottom line.”
Robert LaMay was a Washington State Patrol officer who resigned in October of last year to protest Washington’s COVID-vaccine mandate for state employees and went viral with a video in which he said, “This is the last time you’ll hear me in a State Patrol car. And Jay Inslee can kiss my ass.” Soon after, he was invited to appear on Laura Ingraham’s Fox show, where he was praised by Ingraham, who asked, “What’s next for you—other than being a celebrity now—what’s next for you?”
On January 28, 2022, LaMay died of an allegedly COVID-related cause. He was 51. Fox only covered his death on their website.
Occasionally, Fox belatedly covers a story after caving to public pressure. On December 13, 2021, the January 6 committee released texts from Fox hosts to then–White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, which included Ingraham writing, “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” and Sean Hannity texting, “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.” Both hosts waited until the next day to address the issue on their evening programs, perhaps because the texts contradicted what they had said on air, offering cover to January 6’s armed insurrectionists. When Ingraham did address the texts on December 14, she accused “the regime media” of “somehow trying to twist this message to try to tar me as a liar, a hypocrite who privately sounded the alarm on Jan. 6, but publicly downplayed it.”
Angelo Carusone, the president and CEO of Media Matters for America, a nonprofit organization that covers right-wing media, explained this phenomenon to me: “In the rare instances where they think a development may be so significant that it could pierce the bubble, they’ll distract or deflect or offer a counternarrative to latch onto.”
Is it possible that Fox News viewers are so siloed that if the network ignores news, those viewers might never know it happened? This idea isn’t new—Vox did a useful explainer, with lots of helpful graphs, on Fox’s “alternative reality” in 2018. Here’s what is new: more than 900,000 U.S. COVID-19 deaths, and a post-Trump, mid-pandemic separate set of “facts” for red America. “Fox News very deliberately going out of their way not to cover certain stories is a reflection of and a testament to the bubble their audience exists in,” Carusone told me. “If information isn’t on Fox News or other sources in the bubble, then it doesn’t exist to that segment of the population.” Can one country support two realities? It seems we will find out.