How have Fox News's fact-checking scores changed over the past five years?
Executive summary
PolitiFact maintains an index of fact-checks of Fox News content and provides searchable lists and scorecards by year, but the provided sources do not give a single, ready-made five‑year trendline of “fact‑checking scores” for Fox News; instead they offer year-by-year fact-check entries and searchable filters for 2021–2025 that a researcher can aggregate (PolitiFact’s lists and channel page) [1] [2]. Other outlets (Ad Fontes, Media Bias/Fact Check, Pew, Wikipedia) offer reliability or bias ratings and contextual reporting about controversy, but none in the provided set publishes a five‑year, aggregated numeric “score” series for Fox News that directly answers the user’s question [3] [4] [5] [6].
1. What the main fact‑check databases say — what’s available and what isn’t
PolitiFact has an active page and searchable list of fact‑checks tagged to “Fox News Channel,” with filters by year (including 2021–2025) and by ruling (True through Pants on Fire), allowing someone to count or chart rulings over time, but PolitiFact’s public pages in the search results show lists rather than a precompiled five‑year summary or trend graphic — so an analyst would need to extract and aggregate those entries to produce year‑by‑year scores [2] [1]. PolitiFact’s past network scorecards (illustrated in an older PolitiFact article) show how the outlet has previously summarized network rulings into percent breakdowns, but the example in the results is from an earlier era and does not present a continuous five‑year series up to 2025 in the provided material [7].
2. Other rating systems: bias and reliability ratings offer context but not the same metric
Ad Fontes Media publishes bias and reliability ratings for Fox News and explains its scoring scales (bias −42 to +42 and a reliability axis), which is useful context about editorial slant and reporting practices, but Ad Fontes’ result is a label and two‑axis score, not a PolitiFact‑style tally of true/false rulings over time — again, no five‑year PolitiFact‑style score series is included in the provided Ad Fontes excerpt [3]. Media Bias/Fact Check and aggregators like Ground News provide “Right” or “Mixed factuality” labels that speak to long‑term bias and perceived accuracy, but those are cross‑sectional assessments and not chronological fact‑check scorecards across five years in the sources shown [4] [8] [9].
3. Controversies and lawsuits illuminate why fact‑checks have been numerous
Several entries in the provided material document high‑profile controversies — for example, defamation lawsuits from Dominion and Smartmatic stemming from coverage of the 2020 election and internal documents released in litigation — which help explain why fact‑checkers paid sustained attention to Fox News claims in the years since 2020 [4] [6] [10]. That context suggests increased volume and intensity of fact‑checking around certain topics, but the sources do not quantify how PolitiFact or other fact‑checkers’ ratings for Fox changed year‑to‑year over the past five years without additional aggregation [6] [10].
4. How you could produce the five‑year view using the available sources
Available PolitiFact pages let a researcher filter Fox News rulings by year and verdict (True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, Pants on Fire); extracting those entries for each year [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] and calculating percentages or counts would yield the desired five‑year trend — but that aggregation is not already provided in the search results and would require manual or programmatic scraping of PolitiFact’s list pages [2] [16] [1]. For complementary context, one could add annual bias/reliability snapshots from Ad Fontes or MBFC and note spikes in fact‑checking activity coinciding with litigation or major political events [3] [4] [10].
5. Competing interpretations and limitations in the record
Interpretations vary: trade or academic observers highlight persistent concerns about Fox News’ opinion programming and higher shares of “mostly false or worse” claims in some comparative studies (Wikipedia cites research comparing false‑claim proportions across networks), while Fox News and some defenders argue its reporting and audience reach remain substantial and that straight news reporting can be accurate [6] [5]. The primary limitation is that the provided sources do not include a single authoritative, year‑by‑year numeric “fact‑checking score” series for the past five years; instead, they supply the raw material (PolitiFact entries), bias/reliability labels (Ad Fontes, MBFC), and contextual reporting (Pew, litigation coverage) that an analyst must combine to produce such a series [2] [3] [5] [10].
If you want, I can: (A) extract and tabulate PolitiFact rulings for Fox News for 2021–2025 from the PolitiFact lists shown here and produce year‑by‑year percentages, or (B) assemble a compact chart combining PolitiFact tallies with Ad Fontes/MBFC snapshots and litigation milestones for context. Which would you prefer?