Fox News faces an existential challenge

Fox News is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week

Billboard featuring Tucker Carlson
(Image credit: Photo by Jason Koerner/Getty Images for MoveOn Political Action)

Fox News sits largely comfortably atop the crowd of cable news outlets when it comes to the sheer number of eyeballs aimed at television screens on any given day. That it has become an influencer of conservative sentiment perhaps even surpassing its role as a chronicler of conservative news is a sign of just how uniquely powerful Fox is within right-leaning media.

Nevertheless, Fox has been struggling of late — not in viewership, but under the looming shadow of a potentially seismic ruling for Dominion Voting Systems in that company's defamation lawsuit against the network over having aired false "stolen election" conspiracy theories in 2020. Beyond the monetary threat that suit represents, Dominion's case against Fox has opened the door for a host of separate but interrelated dangers to the network. And this week, several of those threads converged to deliver Fox one of its most existentially challenging stretches in recent memory.

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Rafi Schwartz, The Week US

Rafi Schwartz has worked as a politics writer at The Week since 2022, where he covers elections, Congress and the White House. He was previously a contributing writer with Mic focusing largely on politics, a senior writer with Splinter News, a staff writer for Fusion's news lab, and the managing editor of Heeb Magazine, a Jewish life and culture publication. Rafi's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, GOOD and The Forward, among others.