"Good morning and welcome to the Fox News Channel!" With these unspectacular words from the morning presenter, the new era in US television began on October 7, 1996. The audience was still manageable. At the time, many were skeptical as to whether a right-wing conservative news station could even survive its first few years.
Sean Hannity, now the station's figurehead, has been there from the beginning, has been a prime-time presenter in the evening for many years and is a close confidant of US President Donald Trump. Hannity and many of the early hosts came from political talk radio. The model for Fox News was the astonishing success of the right-wing conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh.
Just as Limbaugh railed against "femi-Nazis" and "environmental psychos" in the early 1990s, Sean Hannity today rails against Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton, who "now bows at the altar of the socialists and communists who now dominate her party."
What hardly anyone thought possible: Within just six years, Fox News overtook the established news channel CNN, which had been striving for balanced and fair reporting since 1980. Today, Fox News reaches up to four million viewers every day - four times as many as CNN and more than all other news networks combined.
Reece Peck has intensively researched Fox News' recipe for success. The political scientist at the City University in New York says it's not just the conservative topics or the polemics against the left: "It's the speech on Fox News that doesn't come from above. It's not the moderator attitude that had dominated until then. A large proportion of US citizens can't do anything with this professional but robotic moderation. They wanted a different speech," says the political scientist.
Talking like people without a university degree, taking a clear stance instead of balanced reporting, polemics instead of political correctness. This means that Fox News not only became the market leader, says political scientist Reece Peck, but also the opinion leader. Fox News didn't just have viewers like the mainstream networks. Fox News managed to attract an enthusiastic fan base. “Fox News has not only radically changed the US media landscape, but also politics in the USA,” explains Peck. “Such opinionated, partisan journalism never existed in the United States before.”
A recipe for success that set a precedent: the news channel MSNBC, which has been called MS NOW for a year, became a left-progressive news channel and also overtook CNN. A media development that contributed to the polarization of US society, says Reece Peck: "Everyone is now copying the recipe. Left and right. And so there is a hyperpoliticization of journalism. It's no longer about truth or facts, but about which team wins."
The political scientist is convinced that without Fox News, Donald Trump would not have been elected president twice. Trump watches Fox News, bases his politics on Fox News, and has made former Fox News hosts like Pete Hegseth Secretary of Defense and Sean Duffy Secretary of Transportation. Conversely, the current White House spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, will move to Fox News on November 1st.
Still, the relationship between Trump and Fox News hasn't always been smooth. In the 2016 presidential election campaign, Rupert Murdoch wanted to prevent Trump as much as possible. Fox News first supported Marco Rubio, then Ted Cruz. Trump's role in the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 went too far even for Fox News. And the channel recently expressed solidarity with CNN and Politico after Trump denied their correspondents access to the White House.
The unpopular war against Iran also did not meet with approval from all Fox News presenters. Trump had promised during the election campaign: “No more wars abroad!” Fox News may have passed the peak of its effectiveness, says political scientist Reece Peck.
The average age of the audience is 70 years. Younger conservatives are more likely to listen to “bro podcasters” like Joe Rogan or Shawn Ryan. "Fox News knows that the business model for cable channels is declining," says political scientist Peck. "Additionally, the audience is aging. The fan base could gradually die out."
But such swansongs on Fox News have been going on for ten years. Last year the station still generated a net profit of almost $1.7 billion. Fox News remains a cash cow in Rupert Murdoch's media empire.
