Emotions often run high on cable news networks, and Fox News is certainly no exception. Two university professors went through more than 1,000 transcripts from both Fox and its ideological opposite, MSNBC, and found that the former uses the word "hate" five times more frequently than the latter. Perhaps not surprisingly, the antipathy was most common when the network was focusing on people opposed to then-President Donald Trump.
Robert Mathew Entman of George Washington University and Curd Knüpfer of Freie Universität Berlin said they were surprised by their findings. “We expected to find that both of the strongly ideological networks made use of such words,” they said. "Fox usually pairs certain words alongside ‘hate.' The most notable was ‘they’ – as in, ‘they hate.’ Fox used this phrase 101 times between January and May. MSNBC used it just five times.”
According to the study, Fox's use of "hate" has been steadily increasing since 2009, spiking when Trump took office in 2017.
Focus on Fox:
- About the same number of Americans trust Fox News as distrust it: 43 percent to 40 percent.
- In an average week, 39 percent of Americans tune into Fox News -- a virtual tie with CNN.
- In 2018, the median age of a Fox News viewer was 65 years old.