The Fall of Fox News: How Entertainment Replaced Journalism and Truth Lost Ground

Once defended as a legitimate member of the press, Fox News has, over time, revealed itself to be a political entertainment machine built on deliberate misinformation. The Dominion lawsuit and internal communications exposed how its anchors privately acknowledged the falsity of their on-air claims about the 2020 election, prioritizing ratings over truth. While other outlets have publicly reckoned with their failures, such as misleading Iraq War coverage, Fox’s deception is purposeful, not accidental. Its persistence has eroded public trust, blurred the boundary between journalism and propaganda, and weakened the credibility of the press as a whole.

For years, Fox News provoked criticism, but during Barack Obama’s first year in office, it was still viewed by many as part of the legitimate press. When the administration tried to exclude Fox from an interview with “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg in 2009, other networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN—stood in solidarity. ABC’s Jake Tapper even called Fox “one of our sister organizations.” Many journalists, though critical of Fox’s primetime personalities, believed its newsroom division still met professional standards. Defending Fox, then, felt like defending journalism itself.

At the time, there was an unspoken understanding among reporters that the integrity of the press depended on unity—especially against political power. The Obama White House’s attempt to sideline Fox was seen as a threat to the entire press corps, regardless of political leanings. To push back wasn’t an endorsement of Fox’s editorial slant; it was an assertion that the government has no authority to decide which outlets deserve access. Even journalists who openly disagreed with Fox’s commentary rallied to its defense, knowing that once a precedent for exclusion is set, it can be used against anyone.

There was also a lingering sense that, beneath the bombast of its primetime lineup, Fox still housed a credible newsroom capable of breaking stories, verifying facts, and holding officials accountable. Anchors like Chris Wallace were respected for their interviewing rigor. Reporters such as Major Garrett and Carl Cameron were seen as professionals operating under the same ethical standards as their peers at ABC or CBS. The division between Fox’s news and opinion arms gave critics an out: they could condemn its rhetoric without denying its right to the table.

That era is gone.

The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit stripped away whatever illusion of credibility Fox News still possessed, exposing the network as a political entertainment machine disguised as journalism. In thousands of pages of discovery material, Dominion’s attorneys revealed text messages, emails, and depositions from the network’s highest-paid figures—Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson—showing that they knowingly spread lies about the 2020 election. Privately, they mocked Trump’s claims of voter fraud and called his lawyers “crazy” and “liars.” Publicly, they amplified those very conspiracies to appease an audience furious that Joe Biden had won the election. The $787.5 million settlement that followed wasn’t simply a legal defeat; it was a confession in everything but name. Fox’s executives had chosen propaganda over truth because telling the truth would have cost them ratings—and with it, profit.

The deception didn’t end there. When Carlson described the January 6 insurrectionists as “sightseers,” he did so using exclusive Capitol surveillance footage handed to him by then–House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The edit framed a violent mob as peaceful tourists, recasting one of the most documented attacks on American democracy as harmless dissent. No editor, producer, or executive stepped in to correct the distortion. The network’s silence was its approval. What Dominion uncovered in emails—contempt for truth, contempt for viewers, and blind loyalty to narrative—had fully metastasized into Fox’s editorial culture. News had become theater, and truth an expendable casualty of audience retention.

Howard Kurtz, Fox’s media reporter, once criticized the Obama administration for marginalizing Fox, writing in The Washington Post that the White House had gone too far. Today, under Fox management, he avoids confronting the network’s ethical collapse. Initially barred from discussing the Dominion case, he later reframed it as a free speech dispute, sidestepping its central issue—Fox’s willful dissemination of falsehoods.

Fox’s defenders often fall back on a familiar refrain—that bias exists everywhere in the media, and Fox is simply another outlet with a point of view. But that argument collapses under scrutiny. Bias is not the same as fabrication. The mainstream press’s failures in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when major outlets repeated unverified claims about weapons of mass destruction, were catastrophic but rooted in credulity and institutional cowardice, not conscious deceit. Reporters were misled by officials, and editors failed to challenge the narrative aggressively enough. Those errors were later acknowledged in full view of the public. The New York Times published a formal mea culpa. The Washington Post acknowledged that it had underplayed dissenting voices. The lesson was painful, but it proved the core difference between failure and fraud: accountability.

Fox, by contrast, cannot plead ignorance or error. It manufactures misinformation with precision and intent. Executives and hosts have seen the internal polling, read the texts, and watched the metrics that tie audience outrage directly to revenue. They know the damage their narratives inflict on elections, on institutions, on public trust, and they persist because deception pays. Tucker Carlson, who once expressed regret for promoting the Iraq War’s false justifications, now wields the same propaganda tools he once condemned. The distortion is deliberate, not accidental; it’s baked into the network’s business model.

That distinction matters. The Iraq coverage was a collective failure of journalism—a case study in how fear and conformity can corrode truth. Fox’s operation is a calculated enterprise of manipulation, driven by profit and political alignment, sustained by silence from those who know better but refuse to act.

The tragedy is not only that Fox continues to thrive, but that its misconduct allows others to dismiss legitimate media accountability as hypocrisy. It blurs the line between free speech and calculated disinformation, eroding the public’s already fragile trust in journalism. To call Fox News a “news organization” is to dilute the meaning of the term itself.