These days, Fox News—and its power—is a given part of political life. But Fox becomes top of mind each election season, when even casual politics-watchers have to pay attention to what the network has to say. (This Slate piece from last week, which focused on Fox News’ take on the presidential debate, was so widely read that it helped the site set a traffic record for the year.) So it makes perfect sense that on the eve of this year’s presidential election, the 10th season of Slow Burn, Slate’s lauded investigative history podcast, would focus on how the network became the Fox News we know today.
Slow Burn: The Rise of Fox News is a must-listen—not only to understand how the network’s identity was shaped in the early aughts, but also to process why attempts to prevent the network from gaining traction in its nascent years failed. For those of us who lived through the chaos of the 2000 election, the surge of patriotism after 9/11, the march to Iraq, the rise of the internet, and John Kerry’s humiliating loss to George W. Bush in 2004, this season is a reminder that it wasn’t at all a simpler time—and that there are plenty of through lines from then to now.
I asked host Josh Levin a few questions about the season over email. You can (and should!) listen to it here, here, or here.
Hillary Frey: Josh, where did the idea to dig into Fox News this way come from?
Josh Levin: I’ve worked on Slow Burn from the beginning in a behind-the-scenes role, starting with Leon Neyfakh’s exploration of what it felt like to live through Watergate and going all the way through Christina Cauterucci’s look at America’s first big political fight over gay rights. (I also hosted Season 4 on the political rise of David Duke. Check that one out when you’re done with Season 10!)
Listen to Slow Burn:
Apple Podcasts
Each Slow Burn series has to do a couple of things at once. First, it needs to be a great standalone story with its own narrative momentum, full of interesting people doing captivating things. It also has to feel connected to what’s happening in America today, so there are real stakes to the history you’re investing all this time learning about.
So, why Fox News? It’s this rare institution that hasn’t been around for all that long—it launched in 1996—but has so clearly changed the country and all of us who live here. I wanted to understand how that happened, and whether it was inevitable that Fox would become a political and cultural kingmaker. I also wanted to look at Fox’s critics and antagonists, and see how their efforts look now, with the benefit of hindsight. How were they prescient? How were they naive?
Plus, Fox News is still here, in some ways doing the same things it’s always done, but in other ways moving through the world very differently. Our series is bookended by a couple of presidential elections, Bush v. Gore in 2000 and Bush v. Kerry in 2004, both of which Fox News was heavily involved in and (maybe) played a role in deciding. With another big election less than two months away, this felt like the right time for a deep dive.
In your months of reporting, what surprised you most?
There’s a whole lot of small stuff that I had no clue about, like the fact that Fox News used to have a call-in show about pets and that the name of the morning show, Fox & Friends, is a double entendre.
In a larger sense, the nature of 24-hour cable news is that no one—not even Fox’s biggest fans—is paying attention all the time. That means that a lot of what people know (or think they know) about Fox News is either based on brief snippets or a kind of ambient sense of what Fox is and what it stands for.
That ambient sense isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s often incomplete. Fox’s behavior around 9/11 is one good example of that. I think there’s a general feeling that they sold George W. Bush’s war on terror much more aggressively than other networks. That’s mostly true, but I think people will be surprised—and I’ll admit that I was—that Fox’s reporting on the day of Sept. 11 was in some ways more restrained than the broadcast networks’ coverage. The shift from that day to the days that followed was really pronounced and says a lot about how Fox operates.
Who do you think came closest to “defeating” Fox, or at least put up the best fight? What would defeating Fox even mean?
Fox wore pretty much every critique from journalists as a badge of honor—a sign that they were doing things differently and in a way that schoolmarms in the mainstream press didn’t approve of or understand. They also actually enjoyed when comedians went after them. Getting mocked by The Daily Show, for instance, was a sign that they’d really made it.
The people and groups that really got to Fox were the ones that treated them less like a media organization than a political operation (which, in fairness, is how Roger Ailes ran Fox). Or to categorize things another way: Attempts to shame Fox inevitably failed while attempts to instigate mass actions against them were more successful, or at least were more likely to worry Fox.
A more technical question: Approximately how many interviews did you and the Slow Burn team do for this season? And how many hours of archival tape do you think you’ve listened to?
We recorded interviews with about 50 people from inside and outside Fox News, and in our reporting process we spoke with many, many more than that. Our production team, led by executive producer Lizzie Jacobs, has watched and listened to … millions of hours of tape? No, it only feels that way. Lots of tape. Lots and lots and lots of tape.
Is there an interview or piece of tape that you haven’t been able to get out of your head through all of your research?
We spoke with a bunch of Fox News journalists who’ve been reckoning with their experience there—how they believed they were doing good work but are now feeling less and less sure about what it all added up to. Each of them is in a slightly different place in grappling with all that, but I’m grateful to all of them for processing those feelings out in the open.
Last question: Will you be watching Fox News on election night?
It’ll be on the buffet, for sure. Election night Fox is its own recurring psychodrama, so I’ll be fascinated to see what this next chapter looks like.
