What are the most common topics of misinformation on Fox News?
Executive summary
Fox News has repeatedly been identified in reporting and fact-checking as a frequent source of false or misleading claims across a handful of recurring topics — most prominently the 2020 election and voting-technology allegations, health and COVID-19 related misinformation, and climate-change denial — patterns surfaced by lawsuits, fact-checkers and encyclopedia summaries [1] [2] [3]. Coverage incentives tied to audience size and partisan identity, plus high-stakes legal scrutiny, help explain why those themes keep returning on the network [4] [5].
1. Election fraud and voting-technology claims: a central, litigated theme
The most documented and consequential category of false claims on Fox News concerns the 2020 presidential election, where the network broadcast allegations of widespread fraud and specific falsehoods about voting-machine vendors; those statements triggered multibillion-dollar defamation litigation and the release of internal documents scrutinized by news organizations [1] [5]. The NPR report on the Smartmatic case frames the allegations as familiar, saying a voting‑tech company accuses Fox of defamation for false claims it broadcast about rigged votes in 2020 [1], while The Guardian noted tens of thousands of documents produced in litigation that reveal internal deliberations about that coverage [5], establishing this topic as both frequent and legally fraught.
2. Pandemic-era health misinformation and vaccine-related claims
Reporting and fact-checking organizations have found Fox News programming was more likely than many mainstream outlets to amplify incorrect or misleading claims about COVID-19 and vaccines during the pandemic, and broader “health misinformation” has been singled out by fact-checkers and media analysts as part of a larger misinformation ecosystem in 2025 [2] [6]. PolitiFact and PBS framed 2025 as a year saturated with high-profile lies and flagged health misinformation among major drivers of that environment [6], and Wikipedia’s summary of Fox’s history likewise lists COVID‑19 misinformation as a notable pattern [2].
3. Climate change skepticism and denialist framing
A recurring pattern in assessments of Fox News’ editorial posture is the channel’s promotion of skepticism about climate science and resistance to mainstream climate-policy narratives; encyclopedic and media-bias summaries list climate-change denial as one of the network’s sustained misinformation themes [2] [3]. That pattern is less tied to a single lawsuit than to long-term editorial choices documented by media critics and fact-checkers, who treat climate coverage as an area where framing and selective sourcing produce chronic public misunderstanding.
4. Other episodic falsehoods, partisan framing and the incentives behind them
Beyond those headline themes, Fox has been called out repeatedly by fact-checkers for isolated but politically consequential allegations — for example, inaccurate local or international claims flagged by recent fact checks [3] — and such stories often fit a pattern: they reinforce a partisan narrative attractive to the network’s audience, which in turn drives ratings that keep the cycle profitable [4] [7]. That commercial incentive matters: dominant ratings give the network both the reach to set agendas and the reason to prioritize attention-getting claims over cautious sourcing, a dynamic media critics and rivals cite in explaining recurring misinformation [4].
5. Disagreements, defenses and limits of available reporting
Fox and its defenders argue that many critiques conflate opinion programming with straight news, and they point to corrections, legal settlements, or contested editorial decisions as evidence of responsible journalism; reporting on the Smartmatic suit and other probes, however, shows significant internal and external disagreement over whether errors were isolated or systematic [1] [5]. The public record assembled by fact-checkers, lawsuits and encyclopedic summaries supports identifying the election, health and climate beats as the most common misinformation topics, but reporting limitations remain: available sources document high‑profile patterns and legal findings rather than an exhaustive content audit of every program or daypart on the network [5] [2].
Conclusion: patterns over singular errors
Taken together, multiple independent strands of reporting — legal filings and document disclosures, encyclopedia summaries, and media fact‑checkers — converge on a small set of recurrent topics where Fox News has repeatedly been flagged for false or misleading claims: election and voting‑technology allegations, COVID/health misinformation, and climate‑change denial, all amplified by commercial and partisan incentives that make such themes both attractive and consequential for the network’s audience and political actors [1] [2] [4].