The perfect Fox homepage

Every now and then, the entirety of how Fox News constructs the world is captured in one screen grab: here, the top 10 stories a bit after noon (Eastern US) on Sunday. My favorite is toward the bottom, but enjoy a few highlights of sourcing and news practice on the way.

Our top story: Donald Trump's daughter interviews three agents ("Trump's ICE officers" in the url)  who are concerned that liberal rhetoric makes it hard to wear your brown shirt to the mall anymore.

Second position: Blue cities are bad! (Fox interviews woman about June shooting; the reference to the Fourth of July as "this weekend" raises some contextual questions. Reader comments give a bit more of a sense of what the story is doing there.

Third position: DNI Gabbard goes on a Fox talk show to make the same fictional claims she made in a Fox talk show on Friday.

Fourth position: Mission accomplished! Incredibly inspiring! Pay no attention to those liberal networks and their talk of "firings" and the personnel turmoil at the Pentagon.

Fifth position: It's tough out there for a supermodel, especially when talking to magazines about recording the audiobook for your new memoir.

Sixth position: Caitlin Clark's acting like a liberal! Better quote the OutKick guy and friends complaining about those uppity women on Twitter.

Seventh position: iStock  your friend when you need to illustrate a story about TikTok users complaining about the menu. Good thing the Right People are in office or we'd have to listen to a lot of complaints about beef prices.

Eighth position: Food website reads online reviews!

Tenth position: People go to church outside!

My favorite, though, is the one sneaking in at No. 9 there. Fox joins he cast in celebrating a "Sound of Music" reunion and manages to remember the plot without -- you know, actually remembering the plot:

The Oscar-winning film was inspired by the real-life von Trapp family that fled Austria to escape the Nazi regime. It tells the tale of a 1930s governess who watches over the large family and their widowed father, with the help of music.

Sorry, but as a regular reader, I'm confused. Isn't it supposed to say MIGRANT CARAVAN when a bunch of ungrateful people illegally cross the border with their kids?

'A reputation capable of further injury'

 

My rabbit hole for the day has been Dykstra v. St. Martin's, and I'd like for it to be yours too, so let's take the Birder's Direct Route through presidential scandal framing to get there.

Presidential scandal is, of course, a perennial favorite at Fox News  -- under the right conditions. You can draw some inferences about those conditions from the top stories at the homepage (these are the first one I saw today and the current one, which has been up for around three hours). The "bombshell report" is Director Gabbard's latest effort to reengineer Russian election meddling into a heinous Kenyan plot, floated Friday night on Sean Hannity's talk show. (Yes, that'd be the edition of Hannity that President Trump promoted three times on his social media platform on Friday.) The autopen is handy whenever nothing much is going on and you need to run a picture of Joe Biden.

Now, given Fox's usual eagerness to ride at Trump's side whenever he goes after the media, you might be wondering what the Fox reader has heard about his libel suit against the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch, two Journal reporters and others over the Journal's Epstein birthday card tale -- surely a kinda-sorta pertinent development in presidential scandalhood. The answer seems to be "what naughty birthday card story lawsuit?" At this writing. a Google site search at foxnews.com for the terms /trump libel "wall street journal"/ for July 17-19 yields zero hits. Even the New York Post had managed a story by late Saturday morning:

WASHINGTON — President Trump sued the publisher of The Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over an allegedly “fake” and “defamatory” article that claimed he sent a lewd letter, with the drawn outline of a naked woman, to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday.

News Corp, its chair emeritus Rupert Murdoch and chief executive Robert Thomson; Dow Jones, the Journal’s publisher; and the reporters who authored the report were named as defendants in the suit filed Friday in federal court in the Southern District of Florida.

The Post kindly includes a link to the complaint, whose focus seems to be the PG-at-best message attributed to Trump:

To attempt and inextricably link President Trump to Epstein, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo falsely claim that the salacious language of the letter is contained within a hand-drawn naked woman, which was created with a heavy marker. Worse, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo falsely represent as fact that President Trump drew the naked woman’s breasts and signed his name “Donald” below her waist, “mimicking pubic hair.”

Now, you too may wish to puzzle over how "hand-drawn with a heavy marker" constitutes libel per se or how -- given the public record -- a statement like "She turned to Epstein’s family and friends. One of them was Donald Trump" constitutes libel per quod. But set those aside for a moment, because Lenny Dykstra* is on deck:

Moreover, the statements tend to harm the reputation of Plaintiff as to lower his professional reputation in the community or deter third persons from associating or dealing with him and, as such, constitute defamation per se.

If you're familiar with Trump's other legal claims -- for example, that CBS's editing of an interview persuaded so many likely voters to back the word salad lady that he had to spend extra money advertising in states he though were safe, just to make up for it -- you could also be wondering: Where's that line of people who were planning to associate with Donald Trump but changed their mind Thursday night after reading that he drew boobs on a card 20-some years ago? Well, that was the sort of issue at stake when Dykstra sued a former Mets teammate, Ron Darling, over his memoir.

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Shut up and dribble

If you're familiar with the process by which management always offers and labor always demands, or someone else's terrorist becomes your liberation fighter, you'll recognize the refrain here: You're politicizing, but the bluff little guy from the sports pages is Just Asking Questions. And thus is another pile of Trump-fluffing hooey passed off as reasoned journalistic commentary. 

Couple of points. Disasters are something we can study and learn stuff from, by way of averting future disasters, mitigating their impact, or helping people and governments recover from them. Natural disasters can be distinguished from technological or human-caused disasters -- some of the time. A hundred-year rainfall above a poorly engineered dam can produce both. Disasters can be made worse by deliberate actions (locking the exit doors) or by a lack of action (like, regular fire inspections or the installation of warning systems).

Disasters are like any other kind of news, only more so, meaning the measurable, "objective" elements of an event are put together by distinctly subjective processes. Looting and panic get a lot of coverage, even when they don't happen. "Proximity" can be as much cultural as geophysical (see Adams' chart of TV minutes per 1,000 earthquake deaths). Quick-onset disasters tend to get more attention than slow-onset disasters. (Hurricanes, of course, are an exception, but a heat wave can kill 10 times as many people as a tornado and go largely unnoticed.) That's because news is a process of presenting information through narrative structures. A ballgame, a courtroom confrontation, a campaign debate or a rescue of children from a burning house* is "dramatic" because it takes the form of a story when it's told.

Now, back in the old days, a kindly old editor might have reminded you that a hurricane isn't a "tragedy" unless it murders its stepfather at the behest of its old man's unquiet ghost. "Tragedy" is an inherently political term, and -- as with scandals or crises -- the authority to call "tragedy" is political authority, whether it's exercised in the newsroom or on the presidential Twitter feed.** Mitch Albom is invoking that authority here to make sure you talk the way he wants you to talk -- especially about his friends:

Tragedy is too small a word for this event. It should be a moment of empathy. A moment of prayer. A time to reflect on how small we are in the eyes of nature.

This is, at the nicest, question-begging. And in terms of disaster response and mitigation, there are usually much better things to do than reflect on your relative size in the eyes of nature. But there's a point to be made here about Society:

Instead, it has become about blame.

This should surprise no one. It is a pattern we have developed in our country. There is no such thing as a terrible event just happening. It must be someone’s fault.

Mitch seems to be confusing disasters he's heard about with disasters in general. As noted above, not all disasters reach even the avid news consumer in the same way. But hang on, because the lecture's coming:

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And here's a partial score ...

Be honest, now. Who among you, especially in These Parlous Times (and it's always These Parlous Times somewhere), wouldn't  -- or hasn't* -- put a sports story at the top of the front page? So it wouldn't be fair to question Fox News's judgment a priori on this one, which reached the No. 4 spot on the homepage May 17. Let's dive in:

Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese had a heated exchange after the Indiana Fever sharpshooter fouled the Chicago Sky forward in the third quarter of their matchup Saturday.

Reese pushed Fever forward Natasha Howard in the back as she grabbed an offensive rebound off a miss by teammate Rebecca Allen.

Reese brought the ball low, and Clark fouled her before she went up for a shot. Reese fell to the ground.

Reese got up from the floor and got into the face of Clark.

OK so far?

Referees looked at the play and determined Clark used her left hand to shove Reese to the floor. They upgraded the personal foul on Clark to a flagrant foul. And Reese and Aliyah Boston of the Fever were issued technical fouls.

"Nothing malicious about it, just a good take foul," Clark told ESPN's Holly Rowe.

Ready for the nut graf?

It seemed to be another chapter in the rivalry between Clark and Reese.

The two had an intense rivalry during their time in women’s college basketball. Clark spoke on the importance of defeating rivals on the floor before the game against Chicago.

"Rivalries are real, and that's what makes sports so amazing," Clark told ESPN. "There's certain teams that those games just mean a little bit more. [We] come out here and play the same way every night, but [a rivalry] gets the fans involved, and they love it."

Now, if you're a sports fan, or perhaps even if you're not -- are you starting to get the sense that something's missing here?

Clark’s history with the Sky began last season.

Clark took a series of questionable fouls from Reese's Sky throughout the 2024 season, including one from Reese June 16.

Clark also took an infamous illegal hip check from Chicago Sky forward Chennedy Carter June 1. Then, in late August, Chicago's Diamond DeShields committed a hard foul on Clark, who went flying across the floor. The foul was later upgraded to a flagrant violation, and DeShields later posted screenshots of hate messages she had received from the foul.

But Clark's team prevailed, taking three of the four meetings between the teams last year, which were among the most-watched WNBA contests all season.

The Sky and Fever meet five times in 2025.

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