"The stock price is down": The biggest Fox News fails of 2023

Fox News' brand of journalism is widely regarded as, well, not quite that. Though the network features — and has curtailed at critical hours — some news programming, it more frequently champions the staunchly right-wing commentary of its most popular shows, which traffic in misogyny, racism, transphobia and xenophobia, if not all-out conspiracy theorizing. 

The network has come a long way since its founding in 1996, today acting as a trusted source for much of the nation's most conservative audience by providing its millions of viewers with the news they want to hear — at times at the cost of true fact-based reporting and factually honest political analysis. In some ways, Fox News has appeared to embrace that. It changed its longtime motto "Fair and Balanced" to "Most Watched, Most Trusted" in 2017 after all. That said, Fox Corp. remains bright on the radar of media watchdog groups (and prominent in the headlines of liberal and progressive publications) that endeavor to track its news department's failings and expose the dangers of its opinion offerings' bigoted rhetoric. 

Salon has rounded up some of the network's biggest fails of 2023:

Putting the company's stock above telling viewers the truth about the 2020 election

The depth of Fox News' apparent scheme to simultaneously deceive and appease its audience by peddling 2020 election lies was revealed early this year after Dominion Voting Systems filed a damning, nearly 200-page brief in its $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox Corp.

The February court filing detailed texts and emails between some of Fox News’ top anchors and executives exposing how they did not believe the lies they pushed and, in some cases, were more concerned with how neglecting to further circulate the claims could hurt their finances. 

In one instance outlined in the filing, Tucker Carlson, the network's top star until his firing in April, and host Sean Hannity urged executives to fire a Fox reporter who tweeted that election infrastructure officials debunked voter fraud claims, with Carlson texting Hannity that reporter Jacqui Heinrich's fact-check was "measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke." Hannity escalated the complaint to CEO Suzanne Scott, who, per the filing, told company executives Heinrich had "serious nerve doing this" and worried about viewers' potential disgust with it. Heinrich deleted her tweet soon after.

A Fox News spokesperson rebuked the filing, telling NPR that the voting technology company had "mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law." 

But come mid-April, right as the civil trial began, Fox News agreed to settle the lawsuit for $787.5 million, accepting with "no contest" the judge's previous rulings that "the evidence does not support that FNN conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting" and makes it "CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true."

Fox News acknowledged the judge's rulings, adding, "We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues."

The settlement, according to Time, meant the rulings stood as legal fact and could not be appealed all while opening the company up to greater legal battles.

The company was hit with a shareholder lawsuit — filed under seal — two days later that, per Bloomberg Law, could blame Fox's leadership for putting the corporation in legal peril. A lawyer for international voting tech company Smartmatic, which sued Fox in 2021 for $2.7 billion for defamation, also signaled shortly after that Dominion's award set a baseline his company plans to exceed.

Espousing white nationalist, anti-immigration rhetoric 

White nationalist rhetoric has become a prominent fixture of Fox News' opinion programming, especially after Carlson made it a key feature of his show.

In 2023, the rhetoric, alongside fearmongering and xenophobia, bled into the network's news coverage in response to the May 12 expiration of Title 42, a Trump-era policy that forced migrants out of the country and effectively halted the asylum system in a supposed effort to contain the spread of COVID-19. Public health experts had previously rejected the notion that migrants played a major role in the spread of the virus in the U.S.

Media Matters compiled more than 25 instances of Fox News anchors and hosts alluding to, if not outright pushing, the white, Christian nationalist "great replacement" theory in the two weeks leading up to Title 42's expiration.

The ideology alleges a plot perpetrated by those in power — often claimed to be Jews and Democrats — to replace white citizens in the West with nonwhite, non-Christian immigrants who will effectively threaten white people's lives and power. It has motivated a number of mass shootings in recent years, including a 2018 attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a 2019 massacre at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart and a 2021 grocery store shooting in Buffalo, New York.

In one instance from Fox's "America Reports," anchor Sandra Smith asked Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. a leading question about the expiration's impact: “The president acknowledged chaos, but is it chaos? Is anybody shocked by this? Or is it a well-executed strategy, Senator?”

Graham's response alleged the Biden administration is "making a conscious effort to allow as many people in this country as they can get in, I think."

The network's push of white nationalist rhetoric is particularly alarming given a February Brookings/Public Religion Research Institute survey found that a majority of respondents who said they most trust Fox News leaned toward Christian nationalism, breaking down to 20 percent of adherents and 34 percent of sympathizers. Adherents and sympathizers amount to 10 percent and 19 percent of Americans, respectively, according to the report.

Running an incorrect story about a fallen Marine, failing to properly correct the report, and pulling it from the site with no explanation.

In July, Fox News published an erroneous report that claimed a fallen Marine's family had to pay for the transport of her remains, citing a false account from Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla. Mills alleged that family members of Sgt, Nicole Gee, one of 13 U.S. service members killed in a bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2021, endured a "heavy financial burden," paying $60,000 to retrieve her body from the country. 

The story, however, was false. Marine Corps officials said the family did not incur any financial burdens in transporting Gee's body to Arlington National Cemetery. They disputed the story — written by Fox reporter Michael Lee — in repeated emails to company executives shortly after its publishing. Mills eventually walked back his claims.

“The allegations originally published turned out to be false, which I suspect Mr. Lee knew in the first place, and was the reason he did not seek comment from the Marine Corps,” wrote Marine Corps spokesman Maj. James Stenger in an email to Fox executives.

Fox first quietly amended the story's headline and revised its opening paragraph, but Stenger followed up to inform the outlet the story was still wrong.

Fox News eventually removed the article from its site completely after receiving additional complaints. However, as The Washington Post noted, it did not correct the false report or clarify its reasons for pulling it in the month after publishing, an intentional alert to readers that news organizations typically make after major changes to published articles.

For its part, the outlet did apologize for the false story in August. 

Continuing to push anti-vaccine rhetoric and misinformation while COVID was on the upswing.

Fox's repeated peddling of vaccine misinformation in response to this year's booster rollout while COVID cases were on an upswing constitutes a major fail given a March report of its direct influence on the nation's COVID vaccine hesitancy.

An early March study in the journal Political Communication found a link between negative reports on COVID-19 shots that aired on Fox and apprehensions toward the vaccines, Bloomberg reported. Concerns about the safety of the vaccines increased following boosted periods of negativity in Fox News' vaccine coverage, the study found, noting that public opinion surveys also showed Fox viewers reported higher levels of vaccine hesitancy throughout the pandemic compared to consistent viewers of other programs. 

“When Fox News’ negativity about vaccines goes up, so too does vaccine hesitancy. When it goes down, so too does vaccine hesitancy,” Matthew Motta, a professor of health policy at the Boston University School of Public Health, told Bloomberg.

Earlier research saw that, starting in May 2021, counties with higher Fox News viewership had lower vaccination rates, while a June 2023 study found that "excess mortality" from COVID was higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after the initial vaccine rollout, but not before. COVID-19 has killed more than 1.1 million people in the U.S. since the 2020 outbreak. 

Fox News did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment.

In August, after President Biden called for new funding to support the updated vaccine booster, Fox News hosts returned to their roots, warning that the shots are dangerous and ineffective, Media Matters reported.

Several suggested that because the first vaccines provided limited protection from newer variants (despite still providing strong protection from death and serious illness), people should doubt the efficacy of an updated shot specifically intended to target current strains. They also urged their viewers — largely comprised of seniors, who are more vulnerable to the virus — against taking the booster.

"That’s a recipe for Fox’s viewers to once again put their health in danger by declining the shots," Media Matters wrote. 

Falsely reporting a terror attack

When reporting on a deadly car accident at the Rainbow Bridge border crossing at the end of last month, network personalities and guests alleged or speculated at least 97 times that the crash was an act of terrorism. The hours of false claims Fox News aired drew mostly on an X/Twitter post from correspondent Alexis McAdams, who attributed her information to anonymous "high level police sources" before walking them back and blaming her allegations on "conflicting reports."

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Just over an hour after her tweet, The New York Times reported that an investigation found the car "did not contain explosives," as McAdams had claimed, and that investigators did not suspect any terrorist activity. Ultimately, McAdams had to retract her initial report, again citing "conflicting reports" she had encountered.

McAdams' retraction came far too late, however. By then, other Fox News personalities had already picked up the story and woven a bigoted narrative implicating Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians. Anchor John Roberts piled on, baselessly suggesting Hamas may have executed the supposed terror attack. 

The report also caught fire on social media where a number of right-wing and anti-Muslim influencers stoked the fearmongering with more misinformation about alleged evidence found at the scene and speculated potential target locations for another attack.

Worse still was that after McAdam's retraction, Fox News hosts and anchors exploited the deadly incident to further its nativist, anti-immigration messaging. Host Kayleigh McEnany even suggested that inferring the car's explosion was linked to Hamas or pro-Palestinian protests was reasonable. 

Israel's war on Hamas, which has since killed nearly 20,000 Palestinians, in the besieged Gaza Strip had already sparked an uptick in anti-Arab and Islamophobic incidents in the U.S. Fox News' manufactured terror attack likely only added fuel to that vitriol, an extremism expert told Salon. 

Despite its failures, Fox remains the top cable news network in the nation, averaging more total day viewers than other basic cable networks like MSNBC and CNN, Nielsen ratings data shows, according to Adweek. 

For what it's worth, however, Fox's ratings haven't fully recovered from the slump that followed Carlson's April firing. Last month, the network averaged 1.725 million viewers during primetime while last November, albeit a midterm election year, the channel's primetime offerings netted 2.4 million viewers.