USA · Bias: Right
Murdoch family (Fox Corporation)
Founded by Rupert Murdoch and the late Roger Ailes in 1996, Fox News has been the single most-watched cable news network in America for a jaw-dropping 97 straight quarters — basically 24 years without losing the ratings crown. In early 2026 it was still pulling around 2.6 million primetime viewers, more than CNN and MS NOW combined. That dominance came at a price: in 2023, Fox paid Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit over hosts repeatedly airing false 2020 election-fraud claims — the largest known media defamation settlement in U.S. history. The network never really apologized on air; it just wrote the check and moved on, which tells you plenty about how it treats being factually wrong.
In May 2017, Fox News ran a story claiming murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich — not Russian hackers — had leaked the Democratic Party's emails to WikiLeaks. The motive was obvious: it fit neatly into a narrative that Russia hadn't interfered in the 2016 election at all. There was just one problem: it wasn't true. Fox retracted the story within a week, but not before it spread across right-wing media as gospel. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, the FBI, and the U.S. intelligence community all later confirmed it was Russian military intelligence that hacked the DNC. Rich's grieving parents sued Fox for exploiting their son's murder to push a political narrative, and in October 2020 the network quietly settled for a seven-figure sum rather than let the case go to trial.