Those who watch Fox News often love to brag that they are listening to something other than “mainstream media.” This has always been a funny claim…after all, Fox is the largest cable news company in America. If they aren’t the mainstream, then who is? However, being America’s biggest source of cable news also means that the network has been home to some of the biggest scandals in journalism history.
What makes these scandals so major is that they concern some of the network’s biggest names. Fox helped transform many conservative journalists into household names, and these talking heads helped shape the narrative of the country’s biggest stories. Once they became the store, though, some of these celebs lost their jobs, and their lives have never been the same.
Who are we talking about, and what did they do? Keep reading to discover the most jaw-droppingly craziest Fox News scandals.
Laura Ingraham mocks a mass shooting survivor and loses advertisers
Like many of the talking heads on Fox News, Laura Ingraham has built an entire career on giving hot takes about hot-button issues. She went a bit too far in 2018, though, targeting Parkland school shooting survivor David Hogg. The young man became a gun control advocate, which was apparently all the incentive Ingraham needed to tweet out “David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates).”
Many thought that a millionaire picking on a young shooting survivor was beyond the pale. Hogg didn’t get mad, though…he got even. He ended up posting a list of companies that advertised on Ingraham’s show and urged them to pull advertising. This worked, and after some of her biggest advertisers pulled away, Ingraham offered a public apology.
Rather than accepting it, though, David Hogg took the opportunity to rub salt in the wound, tweeting that this was just “an apology in an effort just to save your advertisers” and told the famous Fox News figure, “It’s time to love thy neighbor, not mudsling at children.”
RELATED: The Craziest Things Laura Ingraham Has Ever Said About Joe Biden
The Fox CEO was kicked out for sexually harassing his employees
Fox News is, to put it mildly, a big network. So, when the network has a major scandal, fans rush to defend Fox by saying that we shouldn’t let a few bad apples ruin our perception of the entire organization. However, those defenders didn’t have much to say when Fox CEO Roger Ailes was kicked out for sexually harassing his employees, proving that even the biggest name at the network could not remain free of scandal.
Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit against Ailes for sexual harassment in 2016. This opened a floodgate of accusations, with 20 more women coming forward and sharing similar stories. This caused many to wonder what kind of misogynistic culture existed at Fox when the man at the top was at the center of so many sexual harassment scandals.
Rather than being fired from his job as CEO, Roger Ailes was given the chance to resign. He received $40 million in severance and was never convicted, facts which greatly angered his accusers. However, he died the very next year, which some saw as a kind of karmic justice for his alleged wrongdoing.
Glenn Beck calls Barack Obama a racist
Glenn Beck is another conservative media mogul who really made a name for himself on Fox News. Back in 2009, one of the best ways to make waves (and subsequently win more support from the audience) was to find ways to bash newly elected President Barack Obama. Unfortunately, Obama didn’t give the tabloids much to go on compared to other presidents such as George W. Bush or Donald Trump.
However, Beck seized upon Obama’s response to the arrest of Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. A white police officer arrested the Black professor for breaking into his own home (he had forgotten his keys), and Obama later said that the officer made a stupid decision. This caused Beck to go on Fox & Friends and declare (as CBS News reports) that “[Obama has] a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
This caused a minor scandal because Beck was accusing America’s first Black president of being racist. Plus, many agreed with his assessment…regardless of race, who the heck wants to get arrested for simply trying to enter their own home?
RELATED: The Most Critiqued Moments During Barack Obama’s Time As President
Bill O’Reilly pays off his own sexual harassment accusers
Bill O’Reilly was once the titular star of The O’Reilly Factor, but his fall from grace began in 2017. That was the year The New York Times published a bombshell report that the Fox News star had spent $13 million of his own money paying off women who had accused him of sexual harassment. He was never convicted because he settled with these women, but to many who watched his program, the money he paid was an implicit admission of guilt.
His advertisers seemed to agree and began backing out of supporting him. Facing a PR crisis that could have years of repercussions (especially after more and more women came forward to tell their stories), Fox ended up firing O’Reilly, who maintained that all of this was a smear campaign and that he would produce evidence to convince the public of his innocence. To this day, that evidence has never surfaced.