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We don’t often dart Fox News in this column, mainly because it can feel a bit obvious. But this week marks the network’s thirtieth anniversary, which presents an occasion to take stock of its legacy and influence.
Amid many celebrations at Fox this week, Suzanne Scott, the network’s chief executive officer, rang the NASDAQ closing bell. “Three decades ago, Fox Corporation chairman emeritus Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News with an ambitious idea to give audiences another voice in the national conversation,” she declared. Missing from her remarks was any mention of Roger Ailes, who founded Fox with Murdoch based on a vision he’d drafted while working in the Nixon administration: “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News.” As Ben Mullin, the New York Times’ media reporter, noted, it was “a conspicuous omission.” In 2016, a series of women accused Ailes of sexual harassment, and he was forced out. The scandal exposed a deeply entrenched culture of harassment and intimidation at Fox. But the house that Ailes built lives on.
Though much has been made of the fracturing of right-wing media, Fox remains the most popular and powerful source of news-like content for many Americans. In primetime, the channel averages more than 2.6 million daily viewers, far outpacing CNN and MS Now combined. And its dominance extends beyond linear television: Fox News has more than fifteen million subscribers on YouTube and has already driven 3.5 billion views this year. It has also had a measurable impact on the American public’s political views and voting behavior. A 2024 study in the Journal of Public Economics found that greater exposure to Fox shifted viewers’ political preferences to the right and was associated with meaningful gains for Republican candidates.
The coverage is no less partisan, racist, xenophobic, or misogynistic than it was under Ailes. Let’s look at a recent sampling. Last month, Fox published this blatantly Islamophobic screed about a resident in Warren, Michigan, who is deeply disturbed by his Middle Eastern neighbors. “It all started when they bought the mosque, roughly six years ago,” Justin Tye said, about a former Lutheran church that is now an Islamic center. “They’ll turn anything into a mosque.” The headline blared: “Working-class Americans say their town is the next Dearborn—and they’ve had enough.” Apparently, it is understood to their audience that Dearborn is Fox shorthand for not white enough.
Jesse Watters, one of the network’s biggest stars, is prone to sexist rants and recently hosted a guest who said if women “are not going to be homemakers, if they’re not going to be committed moms, then the only role they have left is as sex objects and as workers.” And last week, Fox dusted off one of its favorite fearmongering storylines for the midterms: the ominous approach of a South American “migrant caravan.”
When Fox News debuted, in 1996, Ailes gave it its tagline: “Fair and Balanced.” After Ailes’s ouster, Fox dropped the slogan, because it was “too closely associated with Roger,” according to an anonymous executive who spoke to New York magazine at the time. Probably for the best that they officially dispensed with the pretense: this week, it was announced that Karoline Leavitt, fresh out of her post as White House press secretary, will be joining Fox as a contributor—another passenger through the Trump-Fox revolving door. The network’s current line is “Most Watched. Most Trusted,” which sounds closer to the truth. Trust is often misplaced.
“We were having a brainstorming session with a bunch of editors and reporters, and talking about the fact that you don’t need to have a criminal background check in many places, you don’t have to be a certified teacher, or have a high school diploma, and just how low the barrier for entry is,” Jodi S. Cohen, a ProPublica reporter, recalled to me this week. Cohen is part of a team of more than fifteen people, spanning several newsrooms, that has been looking into how the private school landscape has been changed by an influx of public funding. “One of the editors said, ‘Well, could ProPublica try to establish a school?’ And we all kind of were like, Ha ha, that’d be funny, but then we talked about it more seriously.”
Some thirty states now have programs that allow public money to be used for private school tuition, and the result is a largely unregulated system and a lack of reliable information about where and how hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent. To better understand the process, reporters from ProPublica worked with local journalists to start private schools: One with the Arkansas Times, by filling out a form on a state website, paying a forty-five-dollar fee, and buying an American flag. West Virginia approved another, thanks to the help of Mountain State Spotlight, by way of a handwritten application on a piece of notebook paper. And in North Carolina, ProPublica and The Assembly filed an online notice of intent to open a private school at a brewing company and bar.
“There have been multiple attempts over many decades to establish some sort of voucher-like system,” Jennifer Smith Richards from ProPublica told me, “and now we’re in this moment where everything is moving very quickly.” Beyond their experiment, the team’s findings have been shocking. In Arkansas, a school continues to operate and receive state funds even though the founder served jail time for permitting child abuse. In Florida, a teacher stripped of her license for the sexual abuse of a sixteen-year-old boy was able to open a private school. In Arizona, Mike Tyson, the heavyweight boxer who served time in prison for raping an eighteen-year-old girl, lent his name to a school for foster children and unhoused or expelled students that operates out of a strip mall.
Over the past five years, across thirteen states, ProPublica’s reporting has found, there have been at least fifteen hundred schools established. The reporters have identified private schools opened in “farms and barns, addiction treatment centers, coworking spaces, people’s homes, and parks.” In West Virginia, a school was opened at a family fun center next to a water park, mini-golf course, and go-kart track. “It’s one thing to talk about how easy it is, that anyone can start a private school,” Cohen said. “But then to actually do that and see, wow, it really is just that easy? That was a wake-up call.”
In late 2024, Todd Bookman, a senior reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR), got an anonymous tip about alleged mismanagement and turnover in the administrative office of the state’s judicial branch. “Candidly, we just didn’t know if a story about a maybe bad boss within government would be of interest to our audience,” he told me. But he kept developing sources and pursuing new leads. Eventually, his doggedness paid off, and he landed a bigger story that resulted in an ethics inquiry into Gordon MacDonald, the chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, and, last month, MacDonald’s resignation.
Bookman’s story came eleven months after the tip, an investigation into highly unusual personnel moves involving MacDonald. His reporting uncovered a whistleblower complaint alleging that MacDonald helped orchestrate a nearly fifty-thousand-dollar payment to Dianne Martin, a top court employee and longtime ally. NHPR confirmed the payout through interviews with multiple sources and a review of state payroll records, personnel files, and a previously unreported complaint made by a state employee received through a Right-to-Know request.
In the course of the ethics probe—a direct result of NHPR’s reporting—an independent panel of judges and lawyers determined that MacDonald had failed to “promote public confidence” in the judiciary and to perform his duties competently. “Stories like this shed light on a branch of government we rarely get a look inside of,” Bookman said. He is still on the story. Last week, he wrote about lingering concerns over whether the other justices behaved unethically.
Bookman, who interned at NHPR in 2009 and returned as a reporter in 2016, told me that his work and the resulting fallout show “the power of genuinely local media and having reporters on the ground that live and work in the communities they cover. Our little public radio station has earned a good reputation for doing impactful journalism, and that’s why the sources were willing to speak with us.”
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