What is Fox News? Partisan Journalism, Misinformation, and the Problem of Classification
Abstract
Fox News is one of the most popular news sources in the United States. Yet, there are those who reject the idea that Fox should be considered a news source in the first place, claiming it should be considered something more akin to propaganda. This article uses the ambiguity surrounding Fox News’ classification as an opportunity to explore how news sources get defined and categorized within journalism research and practice. It discusses three approaches that can be utilized to understand and categorize partisan media—producer-focused, audience-focused, and critical/normative. It explores the benefits and limitations of these perspectives and the need for scholarly inquiry that transverses and synthesizes them. We argue that an increasingly variegated news landscape calls for scholars to develop a richer vocabulary for distinguishing key features of partisan news outlets and greater reflexivity in research design that acknowledges the challenges inherent in translating meaning and values between producers, audiences, and scholars.
Get full access to this article
View all access and purchase options for this article.
References
Aday S. (2010). Chasing the bad news: An analysis of 2005 Iraq and Afghanistan War coverage on NBC and Fox News channel. Journal of Communication, 60(1), 144–164.
Antonio R. J. (1981). Immanent critique as the core of critical theory: Its origins and developments in Hegel, Marx and Contemporary thought. The British Journal of Sociology, 32(3), 330–345. https://doi.org/10.2307/589281
Bard M. T. (2017). Propaganda, persuasion, or journalism?: Fox News’ prime-time coverage of health-care reform in 2009 and 2014. Electronic News, 11(2), 100–118. https://doi.org/10.1177/1931243117710278
Bauer A. J. (2017). Before ‘fair and balanced’: Conservative media activism and the rise of the new right [Dissertation]. New York University.
Bauer A. J. (2018). Journalism history and conservative erasure. American Journalism, 35(1), 2–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2017.1419750
Benkler Y., Faris R., Roberts H. (2018). Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics. Oxford University Press.
Benkler Y., Tilton C., Etling B., Roberts H., Clark J., Faris R., Kaiser J., Schmitt C. (2020). Mail-In voter fraud: Anatomy of a disinformation campaign (SSRN scholarly paper ID 3703701). Social Science Research Network.
Brock D. (2004). The republican noise machine: Right-wing media and how it corrupts democracy. Crown Publishers.
Brock, D., Rabin-Havt, A., & Media Matters for America. (2012). The fox effect: How Roger Ailes turned a network into a propaganda machine. Anchor.
Bursztyn L., Rao A., Roth C. P., Yanagizawa-Drott D. (2020). Misinformation during a Pandemic. [Working Paper] Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, University of Chicago.
Carlson M. (2017). Journalistic authority: Legitimating news in the digital era. Columbia University Press.
Carlson M., Robinson S., Lewis S. C. (2020). Digital press criticism: The symbolic dimensions of Donald Trump’s assault on U.S. journalists as the ‘enemy of the people.’ Digital Journalism, 9(6), 737–754. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1836981
Conway M., Grabe M. E., Grieves K. (2007). Villains, victims and the virtuous in bill O’Reilly's ‘no-spin zone’: Revisiting world war propaganda techniques. Journalism Studies (London, England), 8(2), 197–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616700601148820
DellaVigna S., Kaplan E. 2007. The fox news effect: Media bias and voting. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(3), 1187–1234.
Dicken-Garcia H. (1989). Journalistic standards in nineteenth-century America. University of Wisconsin Press.
Gans H. J. (1979). Deciding what’s news: A study of CBS evening news, NBC nightly news, and time. Pantheon.
Gentzkow M., Shapiro J. M. (2011). Ideological segregation online and offline. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(4), 1799. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjr044
Gilbert D. (2021, May 18). Tucker Carlson is using Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein's relationship to radicalize people Into QAnon. Vice.
Gramlich J. (2020). 5 Facts about Fox News. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/08/five-facts-about-fox-news/
Greenwald R. dir. (2004). Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s war on journalism. Disinformation Co.
Groeling T. (2008). Who’s the fairest of them All? An empirical test for partisan bias on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News. Presidential Studies Quarterly 38(4), 631–657. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5705.2008.02668.x
Hallin D. C. (1994). We keep America on Top of the world: Television journalism and the public sphere. Routledge.
Hallin D. C., Mancini P. (2004). Comparing media systems: Three models of media and politics. Cambridge University Press.
Hemmer N. (2016). Messengers of the right: Conservative media and the transformation of American politics. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hendershot H. (2011). What’s fair on the air? Cold war right-wing broadcasting and the public interest. University of Chicago Press.
Hindman M. S. (2018). The internet trap. Princeton University Press.
Hochschild A. R. (2016). Strangers in their own land: Anger and mourning on the American right. New Press.
Hoewe J., Brownell K. C., Wiemer E. C. (2020). The role and impact of Fox news. The Forum, 18(3), 367–388. https://doi.org/10.1515/for-2020-2014
Iskander A. (2005). ‘The great American bubble’: Fox News channel, the “mirage” of objectivity, and the isolation of American public opinion. In Artz Lee, Kamalipour Yahya R. (Eds), Bring ‘em on: Media and politics in the U.S. War on Iraq (pp. 124–138). Rowman and Littlefield.
Jamieson K. H., Albarracin D. (2020). The relation between Media consumption and misinformation at the outset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in the US. The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 1(Special Issue: COVID-19). https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-012
Jamieson K. H., Cappella J. N. (2008). Echo chamber: Rush limbaugh and the conservative media establishment. Oxford University Press.
Kaplan R. (2001). Politics and the American press: The rise of objectivity, 1865–1920. Cambridge University Press.
Konieczna M. (2018). Journalism without profit: Making news when the market fails. Oxford University Press.
Matzko P. (2020). The radio right. Oxford University Press.
Mindich D. T. Z. (1998). Just the facts: How “objectivity” came to define American journalism. NYU Press.
Nadler A. M. (2016). Making the news popular: Mobilizing U.S. News audiences. University of Illinois Press.
Nadler A., Bauer A. J. (eds). (2019). News on the right: Studying conservative news cultures. Oxford University Press.
Nadler A., Bauer A. J., Konieczna M. (2020). Conservative newswork: A report on the values and practices of online journalists on the right. Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University.
Nelson J. L. (2019). What is Fox News? Researchers want to know. Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/fox-news-partisan-progaganda-research.php
Nelson J. L. (2021). Imagined audiences: How journalists perceive and pursue the public. Oxford University Press.
Nelson J. L., Webster J. G. (2017). The myth of partisan selective exposure: A portrait of the online political news audience. Social Media + Society, 3(3), 2056305117729314. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117729314
Peck R. (2019) Fox populism: Branding conservatism as working class. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108634410.
Peters C. (2010). No-spin zones. Journalism Studies, 11(6), 832–851. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616701003658390
Schrag Z. M. (2021, May 17). Tucker Carlson's cries about immigrants have a disturbing 19th-century parallel. The Washington Post.
Schudson M. (1978). Discovering the news: A social history of American newspapers. Basic.
Sherman G. (2014). The loudest voice in the room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes built Fox news—and divided a country. Random House.
Simonov A., Sacher S. K., Dubé J.-P. H., Biswas S. (2020). The Persuasive Effect of Fox News: Non-Compliance with Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic [Working paper] National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA.
Tuchman G. (1978). Making news. The Free Pess/Macmillan.
Usher N. (2014). Making news at The New York Times. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Webster J. G. (2014). The marketplace of attention. MIT Press.
Wenzel A. (2020). Community-centered journalism: Engaging people, exploring solutions, and building trust. University of Illinois Press.
Yglesias M. (2018). The case for Fox News studies. Political Communication, 35(4), 681–683. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2018.1477532
Biographies
A.J. Bauer is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama. He is co-editor of News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2019), and a former fellow of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.
Anthony Nadler is an associate professor of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College. He is the author of Making the News Popular: Mobilizing U.S. News Audiences (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and co-editor with AJ Bauer of News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures.
Jacob L. Nelson is an assistant professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. He is the author of Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Cite article
Cite article
Cite article
OR
Download to reference manager
If you have citation software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice
Information, rights and permissions
Information
Published In
Article first published online: December 3, 2021
Issue published: March 2022
Keywords
Authors
Metrics and citations
Metrics
Article usage*
Total views and downloads: 8483
*Article usage tracking started in December 2016
Articles citing this one
Receive email alerts when this article is cited
Web of Science: 7 view articles Opens in new tab
Crossref: 13
- Margaret Sullivan and metajournalistic discourse: A critic’s view within the journalistic field
- Rooted in White Identity Politics: Tracing the Genealogy of Critical Race Theory Discourse in Identity-Based Disinformation
- Non-Artistic Kitsch
- Cable News Source and Fear of Crime: A Comparison of CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC
- Multiple-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) Techniques and Statistics in Marketing
- The Fourth Estate on Trial: Examining Partisan Bias in Broadcast and Cable News Coverage of the First Trump Impeachment
- American Police Brutality in Black and White: Fox News Website Coverage of the Killings of George Floyd and Tyre Nichols
- ‘Softballs’ for ‘Hardballs’: The congenial political interview on right-wing partisan TV news outlets
- The dark side of entertainment? How viral entertaining media build an attention base for the far-right politics of The Epoch Times
- Taking Political Alternative Media into Account: Investigating the Linkage Between Media Repertoires and (Mis)perceptions
- View More
Figures and tables
Figures & Media
Tables
View Options
Access options
If you have access to journal content via a personal subscription, university, library, employer or society, select from the options below:
I am signed in as:
View my profileSign out
I can access personal subscriptions, purchases, paired institutional access and free tools such as favourite journals, email alerts and saved searches.
loading institutional access options
Alternatively, view purchase options below:
Purchase 24 hour online access to view and download content.
Access journal content via a DeepDyve subscription or find out more about this option.
