What is Fox News? Partisan Journalism,Misinformation,and the Problem of Classification

Despite its growth and influence, the right-wing media sphere had received relatively little notice in mainstream journalism research before the political upheavals of 2016. And even as the number of studies focused on right-wing media grows, the research generally approaches conservative media solely through its relationship to misinformation (Benkler et al., 2018, 2020), rather than asking how conservative media might require a reassessment of news production and consumption more broadly. The result is an increasingly conspicuous uncertainty within the field of journalism studies when it comes to the classification of partisan news sources.

Fox News is a prime example. Though it is one of the most popular news sources in the United States, there are scholars who reject the idea that Fox should be considered a news source at all, claiming instead that it should be considered something more akin to propaganda (Bard, 2017; Conway et al., 2007). Calls for Fox to be reclassified within academic research raise important questions surrounding how journalism scholars categorize sources of information, or even define “news sources” in the first place: Should a source of information that embraces a highly partisan perspective with inconsistent commitments to the accuracy of their reporting be classified as a news source? Who decides whether a perspective is partisan? How should scholars approach such an outlet? Should they consider the size and composition of an outlet's audience when making these sorts of classifications? Should they consider the organization's internal norms, values, and practices? Or ought such definitions reflect some exogenous normative barometer, developed by scholars or reflected in practitioners’ codes of ethics?

This article uses the ambiguity surrounding Fox News’ classification as an opportunity to explore how scholars might conceptualize categories and draw distinctions amongst partisan news sources in the changing media landscape. We examine three vantage points for distinguishing Fox within the news field: those foregrounding producer understandings; those foregrounding audience understandings; and those foregrounding standards developed by scholars or critics. While debates about categorizing Fox have centered on whether or not to consider it as “news,” we argue that an increasingly variegated news landscape calls for scholars to develop a richer vocabulary for distinguishing key features of partisan news outlets. How can scholars improve the discourse surrounding different types of partisan sources of information within the news media environment? And how might they do so without denigrating the millions of viewers of Fox News who do not consider its content to be propaganda, and who do not appreciate being considered dupes? We suggest that answering these questions requires greater reflexivity in research design and acknowledgement of the real perspectival challenges involved in researching conservative news outlets like Fox (and, indeed, all news outlets).

The importance—and difficulty—of classifying Fox

The need for scholars to explicitly tackle how Fox News gets classified and studied has grown more urgent as the network has become more popular and influential while critics charge it with engaging in blatant misinformation campaigns. Fox News may be flawed as a source of accurate information (Bard, 2017), but it is also one of the most popular brands in news—a fact that, itself, makes it a politically, culturally, and historically productive research object. It is also highly trusted among U.S. conservatives: A recent Pew report found that about 65% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters “say they trust Fox News for political and election news” (Gramlich, 2020). As Arlie Russell Hochschild writes, “Fox News stands next to industry, state government, church, and the regular media as an extra pillar of political culture all its own” (2016).

Between its affinity for promoting whichever strand of conservativism predominates at a given time and its efforts to present itself as a producer of hard-hitting journalism, Fox News is not easy for journalism studies scholars to categorize. For starters, Bard (2017) argues the “news” it produces should be classified more as propaganda than fact-based reporting. Researchers suggest that presenting partisan accounts of daily events as uncontested facts may explain why Fox News viewers may hold beliefs about the world that run counter to those of viewers of other major networks (Hoewe et al., 2020). Indeed, a number of recently published studies suggest that Fox News viewers were less concerned with and prepared for the coronavirus pandemic than others in the U.S. (Bursztyn et al., 2020; Jamieson & Albarracin, 2020; Simonov et al., 2020).

A growing number of journalism studies and political communication scholars have taken issue with the notion that Fox is simply another partisan news outlet—emphasizing the outlet's populist stylistic innovations (Peck, 2019), for example, or its position within a wider network of ideological news outlets (Benkler et al., 2018). The uncertainty surrounding Fox poses challenges for researchers attempting to study a constantly changing news media environment. It also reveals a blind spot within journalism studies when it comes to determining how news organizations can and should be categorized within journalism research in the first place (Nelson, 2019). The field currently lacks an agreed-upon mechanism for designating a news outlet as “partisan,” “propaganda,” or something more impartial, and therefore also lacks an understanding of the impact that an organization's classification might have on the way in which it is studied, as well as the way those studies are received both within the academy and beyond.

The classification issues facing Fox News are, thus, a canary in the coal mine of sorts. As news media grow more comfortable staking out partisan and ideological allegiances, journalism scholars will need to reconsider the line between news and opinion, between journalism and strategic communications or propaganda. In light of these shifts: How should scholars approach the question of news outlet classification? And what should be the unit of analysis for these classifications?

Producer-focused approaches

One means of categorizing and evaluating an outlet foregrounds the perspective of producers—it considers the experiences of conservative journalists and media workers when determining what counts as “news,” and what does not. Journalism historians have played a leading role in documenting how popular and professional notions of “journalism” have shifted over time (Dicken-Garcia, 1989; Mindich, 1998; Schudson, 1978). Historians of conservative movements and media have also elucidated the complex motivations of right-wing media activists throughout the 20th century (Hemmer, 2016; Hendershot, 2011; Matzko, 2020). There is also a rich and influential history of newsroom ethnographies that have expanded scholarly understanding as to how journalists themselves define what's “news” (Tuchman, 1978; Gans, 1979; Usher, 2014; Konieczna, 2018; Wenzel, 2020).

Recently, scholars have sought to employ similar interview-based methods to the study of online conservative news outlets. One preliminary study, involving interviews with 22 journalists and editors working at 14 online conservative news outlets, found noteworthy similarities in aspirational ideals between conservative journalists and traditional journalistic professional values. Conservative journalists shared commitments to accuracy, fairly representing differing perspectives, and setting a measured tone of debate. They lamented the clickbait logics of the attention economy. While more mixed on the role of objectivity as a journalistic ideal, many conservative reporters and editors saw their work as more akin to journalism than to partisan commentary or propaganda (Nadler et al., 2020).

That same study identified five elements conservative journalists used to make qualitative distinctions between outlets within the conservative news field: 1) Whether they emphasize original reporting versus analysis and commentary. 2) What professional norms have they adopted. 3) Whether they try to speak to a politically homogeneous or heterogeneous publics. 4) What characteristic style do they uphold, particularly in terms of a tabloid or more elite orientation. 5) Whether they present a diversity of viewpoints within conservatism. While these elements may not necessarily be the most salient for partisan news consumers or critics (nor even all producers), they offer one approach toward identifying more precise distinctions within the conservative news field.

While more study is needed in this vein, access issues complicate efforts to employ ethnographic methods in the study of conservative news outlets (especially notoriously secretive workplaces like Fox; see Sherman, 2014). Nevertheless, a growing number of scholars are employing theoretical frameworks that foreground the values and practices involved in conservative news production. Peck's (2019) Birmingham School-inspired cultraul studies approach to unpacking the stylistic elements of Fox News programming offers a particularly helpful means of balancing the aesthetic and news decisions of conservative media producers with the values and worldviews of their audiences. Nadler and Bauer (2019) have, similarly, called for journalism studies scholars to consider the role of right-wing media outlets in “conservative news cultures,” or the “quotidian production and consumption of conservative news and the circulation of that news within and beyond the modern conservative movement” (5).

These approaches raise at times troubling questions for critics of conservative media. How do producer-focused approaches address the possibility of bad faith actors, who may define “news” in self-serving ways? What role for critique is there in taking conservative journalists’ stated norms and practices at face value?

One final issue with producer-focused approaches to studying partisan news is that many news outlets are unwilling to admit that they have a political ideology, or otherwise do not see political advocacy and reporting the news as mutually exclusive activities. Outlets that take an overwhelmingly conservative or liberal approach to their reporting sometimes present and may even understand themselves as neutral rather than partisan (Fox News’ founding slogan was famously “Fair and Balanced”). This leaves scholars unable to rely on a news outlets’ public self-identification when it comes to categorizing its ideological disposition.

Audience-focused approaches

As an alternative to relying on news outlets’ self-characterization, some scholars have turned to the ideological composition of their audiences as an approach to gauge their ideological position. In their study of online ideological segregation, Gentzkow and Shapiro (2011) used the ideological preferences of a news outlet's audience to determine that outlet's political slant. The assumption was that if an outlet has an audience comprised mostly of liberals, it likely is a symptom of a liberal slant. However, though this assumption may be true for more niche political news sites, it is not true for the larger, more familiar brands. As Nelson and Webster demonstrated in their study of the online political news audiences, Fox News attracts the same distribution of liberals and conservatives as the total online audience (2017). The same is true for liberal-leaning outlets, such as MSNBC and The New Yorker. The heterogeneity of many news outlet audiences—partisan and otherwise—raises challenges for scholars hoping to use the ideological slants of a news outlet's audience as the variable by which to determine the ideological biases of the outlet itself.

More importantly, it suggests that partisanship is just one variable by which people determine which news to consume, and which to avoid. Audience research has revealed that people tend to consume news from a small number of the most popular, familiar brands in news. This is partly due to audience preferences—people equate popularity with quality and are also more likely to consume news from sources their parents and friends consume. It is also partly due to structural circumstances—the more familiar brands in news tend to be the most profitable, providing them the means with which to take advantage of the digital media environment (Nelson & Webster, 2017; Webster, 2014). For example, news sites such as the New York Times and the Washington Post have significantly more money to invest in ensuring that their web pages load quickly, their apps run smoothly, and that their headlines are the most likely to catch their readers’ attention—all of which influence news audience behavior (Hindman, 2018; Nelson, 2021). As Benkler and his colleagues have argued, structural factors that comprise the news media environment can be taken advantage of for more nefarious purposes, and can not only affect the extent to which people find themselves in “right-wing media ecosystems,” but also the extent to which they are willing to believe information that comes from outside of it (Benkler et al., 2018).

The popularity of Fox News among people from politically mixed backgrounds illustrates this point and, in doing so, reveals the limitations of an audience-focused approach to determining meaningful distinctions between Fox and other players in the news field. Even when an outlet's audience composition shows a partisan skew, that does not necessarily mean that audiences themselves perceive the outlet as partisan. Researchers who want to understand how audiences themselves categorize and classify news cannot therefore rely on audience composition alone as an indicator. This is not to say that foregrounding audience perceptions, or accepting the premise that Fox is news when its audience believes it to be news, is complete without merit. Insofar as audiences act upon what they perceive to be “news,” an outlet's content functions as news in real and consequential ways.

Of course, it is likely that not all of Fox's viewers internalize its politicized news coverage uncritically. The routine, critical analysis of clips from Tucker Carlson broadcasts by journalists and academics (Gilbert, 2021; Schrag, 2021) suggests that non-conservative audience members watch Fox to see what the “other side” thinks about current events. The fact that audiences might tune in for a variety of reasons (to get information, to seek alternative opinions, to be rage-entertained, to mock) complicates the simple binary classification of partisan news outlets as news or propaganda. In short, audience preferences are just one piece of the puzzle that determines news audience composition, and these preferences are more complex than the conventional wisdom surrounding partisan selective exposure suggests. Consequently, news audience ideologies make a poor stand-in for making meaningful distinctions between news outlets.

Critical/normative approaches

Like audience-focused approaches, critical or normative approaches may classify Fox through applying standards exogenous to the outlet itself. Here, scholars and critics mostly compare Fox's content to that of other journalistic outlets or external professional ideals. Alternatively, critics may come to normative approaches through a mode of “immanent critique” (Antonio, 1981; Nadler, 2016). In this case, critics rely on norms and standards espoused by Fox producers or Fox audiences themselves and seek to evaluate how well Fox achieves such aspirational ideals in practice. Yet given ambiguity and tension around how to define and measure commonly proclaimed values like “accuracy” and “fairness,” the distinction between applying exogenous standards and practicing immanent critique can be fraught.

The clearest examples of a normative approach to Fox News come from outside the academy. Liberal and progressive media watchdog groups like FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) and especially Media Matters for America arguably lead the way in documenting and criticizing Fox News's forays into political advocacy and misinformation. Indeed, the first books and films analyzing Fox and its myriad impacts on political culture emerged from media activist circles (Brock, 2004; Brock et al., 2004). These accounts not only classified Fox as “propaganda,” following in the long progressive tradition of propaganda analysis (e.g., the Institute for Propaganda Analysis and George Seldes; see Bauer, 2017), they also used metaphors and conspiratorial tones to portray Fox as not merely partisan or opinion journalism, but as an existential threat to democracy itself.

Scholars, too, have held Fox up to standards that neither the outlet's journalists nor audience would necessarily share. Some have also drawn upon Interwar-era propaganda analysis to make sense of Fox's programming tactics (Bard, 2017; Conway et al., 2007), while others rely upon codified professional ethics to assess Fox's journalistic bona fides (Bard, 2017; Peters, 2010). Others have treated Fox as a sort of partisan or ideological exception—an outlet characterized by hybrid news and partisan content that functions differently from more traditional news outlets. These have tended to emphasize the conservative ideological bias evident in Fox's content (Aday, 2010; Groeling, 2008; Iskander, 2005), or theorized its impact within the broader U.S. political and media environments (DellaVigna & Kaplan, 2007; Jamieson & Cappella, 2008).

This approach leaves scholars open to accusations of bias, playing into longstanding conservative movement narratives that depict both the mainstream news media and academia as slanted toward the left. While scholars ought not to constrain their work based upon the vicissitudes of partisan accusations, it is worth acknowledging that scholarly work does not exist in a vacuum. Fox itself routinely covers ongoing scholarly research as culture war fodder, and there are conservative organizations entirely devoted to documenting alleged bias in academic research (e.g., Accuracy in Academia), or even targeting individual academics for harassment (e.g., Campus Reform).

The critical/normative approach also runs the risk of producing conceptual gaps in the scholarly literature. By defining journalism too narrowly, or too normatively, scholars risk ignoring legitimate objects of analysis for journalism scholarship. This has, arguably, already occurred with regard to the relative dearth of historical studies of conservative journalists and right-wing media criticism in the United States (Bauer, 2018). Just because Fox may fall short, or flagrantly violate, professional norms or idealistic standards for information provision does not mean that it is not actively functioning as news—informing audiences, offering a sizeable and influential platform to conservative thinkers and politicians, influencing its non-conservative competitors and audiences.

In short, while self-reflexive, normatively rooted studies of Fox News can and have produced crucial documentation and analysis of Fox's content and broad impact on political cultural and media systems, they are insufficient for understanding how and why the channel's content appeals to its audiences, or the presumably complex motivations of Fox employees themselves.

Conclusion

Though partisan newspapers dominated many U.S. daily news markets throughout the 19th century (Kaplan, 2001), there was a time when a case could be made for guarding terms like “news” or “journalism” with normative propriety. This was in the postwar period when a particular professional model of journalism dominated daily news in the United States and much of Northern and Western Europe (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). Of course, many partisan journals and news programs flourished then too, but news commentary and opinion generally occupied a distinct and supplementary place in both popular and elite news diets. Times have changed.

The increasing array of sources and sites people consider to be “news” no longer share anything close to a monolithic set of professional standards. Distinguishing outlets that deviate from high-modern journalistic norms as not “real news” no longer offers meaningful criticism of Fox News or other partisan sources. If anything, it contributes to the feeling of a circular firing squad, where each side reduces the other to “Fake News!” So how might journalism scholars move forward in such a saturated and disorienting news media environment?

As partisan news sources multiply and diversify, journalism scholars must seek a richer vocabulary for making precise and meaningful distinctions among them. Overheated scholarly and public disputes over whether to call something “news” or how to distinguish between different types of news providers may arise in part because scholars lack shared ways of identifying (and evaluating) the many different practices, aspirations, and norms of outlets that have moved away from the high-modern professionalism of the 20th century (Hallin, 1994). Developing such a vocabulary requires understanding the distinctions that audiences and producers of partisan journalism are making amongst themselves—as well as making critical arguments about which distinctions are pertinent to normative values like democracy, truth, and justice. It also requires greater reflexivity in research design, and acknowledgement of the real perspectival challenges inherent in translating meaning and values between producers, audiences, and scholars—especially when exacerbated by ideological differences.

This is one of the many challenges facing journalism studies, especially at this particular moment of discord over journalistic legitimacy (e.g., Carlson, 2017; Carlson, et al., 2020). Our hope is that, in beginning this conversation surrounding the classification of partisan news, we might not only improve the discourse on partisan news, but in doing so create better conditions for immanent critique of partisan news source based on the aspirational ideals of its producers or readers, rather than only as a kind of transcendent critique based on a set of supposedly universal norms.

With that in mind, we also encourage scholars who seek to contribute to this important topic to consider more comparative approaches when it comes to their work. For example, rather than focus solely on a partisan news outlet's news standards and practices, researchers might consider comparing those standards and practices across outlets, ideological clusters, and/or national news systems. This approach seems to be particularly lacking from the current body of research surrounding partisan news media.

In closing: As Matthew Yglesias observed, “Fox is by no means obscure—but in some respects its very ubiquity … can tend to obscure exactly how strange it is” (Yglesias, 2018, p. 681). It is past time journalism studies scholars tackle this strangeness. We believe doing so will lead to an overdue and meaningful discussion surrounding how news sources get conceptualized, and the impact of those conceptualizations on journalism practice, research, and reception.