The Biggest Fox News Scandals Ever 》

Fox News is one of the most popular but polarizing news organizations. And since it was created in 1996 by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the channel has been home to some of the biggest scandals in journalism. These include scandals involving racism, school shootings, sexual harassment, and more.

So, what are the biggest Fox News scandals ever? We’ve got the full breakdown below.

Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harrassment settlement cost Fox News $32M

Once upon a time, Bill O’Reilly was one of the major faces of Fox News. His fiery onscreen persona on The O’Reilly Factor helped to rile audiences up and set the agenda for conservative discourse across the entire country.

Behind the scenes, though, O’Reilly faced a number of sexual harassment allegations. In 2017, The New York Times reported that Fox News had paid to settle a minimum of five sexual harassment claims against O’Reilly. And the most expensive of these settlements cost the network a staggering $32 million!

Why such a high amount? According to a follow-up New York Times article, that complaint alleged that O’Reilly engaged in “repeated harassment, a nonconsensual sexual relationship and the sending of gay pornography and other sexually explicit material.”

Eventually, Fox got sick of paying millions of dollars to make O’Reilly’s scandals go away. He was fired from his job in January 2017.

Roger Ailes resigns after multiple sexual harrassment claims

Part of the ongoing issue with Fox News is that the problems often go all the way to the top. And this was certainly the case with Roger Ailes, the deceased former chairman and CEO of Fox News.

Ailes allegedly preyed on female subordinate women for decades. One of the major allegations came to light when anchor Gretchen Carlson left Fox News in 2016 and launched a lawsuit against the network. She alleged that Ailes had sexually harassed her for years. Fox began investigating her claims and later settled out of court.

But this opened the door for others to share their experiences of Ailes’ harassment. Accusations came from Fox bookkeeper Laurie Luhn, producer Shelley Ross, and on-air personality Megyn Kelly.

Thanks to Kelly’s clout, Fox gave Ailes the option to retire or be fired for cause. He ended up retiring in July 2016 and then died less than a year later.

Laura Ingraham mocks school shooting survivor

Many Fox News personalities don’t realize how toxic their scandals are until they start losing money. This is something pundit Laura Ingraham discovered when she decided to mock a school shooting survivor.

After surviving the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida in February 2018, 17-year-old David Hogg became an outspoken gun-control activist. Annoyed by this activism, Ingraham took to Twitter and said that Hogg was “Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it.”

In response, Hogg took to Twitter to identify Ingraham’s major sponsors and urged them to boycott her show. This strategy was highly effective: after a third of her advertisers pulled away, Ingraham apologized via Twitter. “I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland,” she wrote.

While this was meant to appease advertisers and viewers alike, many remained horrified that she would attack a school shooting survivor in the first place.

Lou Dobbs’ show gets canceled after defamation lawsuit

When Fox News personalities started sharing false conspiracy theories about election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, which saw Joe Biden beat Donald Trump, major lawsuits ensued.

One of the conspiracy theories was that the voting machines and software created by Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems were somehow rigged to help Biden win the election against Donald Trump. Although the claim was debunked, this conspiracy theory was shared by some of the biggest names on the network, including Lou Dobbs.

Since then, Dominion filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. Smartmatic, meanwhile, filed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit of its own. And after Smartmatic specifically mentioned Lou Dobbs in their lawsuit, his Fox News show Lou Dobbs Tonight was cancelled in February 2021.

Sean Hannity calls the coronavirus a hoax

There were generally two flavors of COVID-19 scandals among Fox personalities. Some were content merely to downplay the danger. This included Jeanine Pirro who said that “talk about coronavirus being so much more deadly [than the flu] doesn’t reflect reality,” Media Matters reports.

Fox even brought in a medical contributor, Dr. Marc Siegel, to downplay the seriousnes of COVID-19. As The BMJ reports, he claimed, “At worst — worst case scenario — it could be the flu.”

The other flavor of this scandal, though, was to claim that COVID-19 was somehow a weapon the Democrats unleashed against Donald Trump. Newsweek reports that Sean Hannity said this of the virus: “They are scaring the living hell out of people — I see it, again, as like, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.”

Rather than apologizing for lying about COVID-19 (which has killed 589,000 Americans as of the time of this writing), Hannity simply told another lie. As NowThis News reports, Hannity would later claim, “This program has always taken the coronavirus seriously and we’ve never called the virus a hoax.”

Tucker Carlson tells viewers to call child protective services on children wearing masks

Even Tucker Carlson’s biggest fans can agree on this: if you ask them about “Tucker Carlson’s big scandal,” the only appropriate response is “which one?”

For example, GBH News reports that Carlson once said an increase in immigration was actually a plot to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the Third World.” This caused a scandal in part because Carlson seemed to be echoing the white supremacist “Great Replacement Theory.”

More recently, he caused a scandal by encouraging his viewers to confront people wearing masks because of COVID-19. Carlson claimed that his viewers should “politely but firmly” order people wearing masks to remove them. And if viewers saw a child wearing a mask, Carlson instructed them to call child protective services to report the parents.

Sadly, Carlson is merely the latest Fox figurehead to create chaos and confusion about COVID-19.