Who's gonna read the second paragraph?

How does the media agenda go together at the Fox News homepage these days? Let's enjoy a current example, with some trivia from the past three years thrown in for context and fun.

Methodological details below, but broadly: This is a set of screen captures of the top stories at the foxnews.com homepage from 2022 through mid-2025, with the goal of approximating -- roughly -- what you might see if Fox was a multi-edition big-city tabloid and you were passing several newsstands a day and buying the late stocks edition at the subway stop. Of course Fox isn't a real tabloid, but you're not a straphanger in 1964 either, and as Walter Burns put it, who's gonna read the second paragraph anyway? With that out of the way, on to your top 10 from 1:29 p.m. Eastern US on Saturday.

How often does social media erupt? Often enough that you don't want to buy property downwind from it. "Social media erupts" in 40 unique headlines (including one "quickly erupts") across the data set. Social media also explodes (14 times), is set ablaze or lit on fire (11), goes nuts, goes wild, has thoughts, is stunned, has field days, has shivers sent down its spine, is sent into frenzies, and so forth.* That's not counting the transitives (or the 18 times that Twitter erupted or exploded before the Musk purchase.)

As noted earlier, social media doesn't erupt by itself. It usually gets a hand from a cadre of favorite influencers: in this case, Paul Szypula (@bubblebathgirl), who provides the outrage and the headline. In a convenience sample for 2024-25 of stories sourced to this group of usual suspects, he shows up 20 times, trailing LibsOfTikTok (32) and the RNC Research account (24) but ahead of Fox contributor Joe Concha (18), Collin Rugg of Trending Politics (13), and Ian Miles Cheong and Trump War Room (12 each).

A content analysis can't demonstrate a direct agenda-setting effect, but some inferences about the transfer of issue salience suggest themselves from the reader comments (more than 9,000 at this writing). It is not, in short, a story about off-year local elections in the Midwest:

• the REAL EXENTENTIAL threat to america has been imported by who over the decades? hint: diversity is............
• Learn English
• Minneapolis is infested...
• Islam taking over one congressional seat at a time. It’s obvious. 
• Minneapolis had long been a lost cause!
• Diversity without assimilation is leading to the downfall of America. United we stand, divided we fall. 

There are, of course, other opinion leaders on the page -- for example, Bill Maher.** "Real Time rebuke" is the day's second unique Top 10 story based on Maher's "Real Time" program; a different story, by a different writer, appeared in the day's first capture as "Dems in chaos." "Bill Maher" is also the 23rd most frequent hed string across the data set, with 170 appearances, just behind "Anti-Israel" and "breaks silence" (176 each) and "Secret Service" (172), but ahead of "Kamala Harris" and "President Biden" (165) each, "Caitlin Clark" (150), "illegal immigrant" (143), "reality check" (125), "sounds alarm" (121), "Tom Brady" (117) and "Prince Harry" (116).

Monitoring the liberals is core watchdog journalism at Fox, but Maher has a special place as an apostate. Generally, only conservatives can blast in the active voice at Fox; liberals have to submit to being blasted. Because Maher blasts to the left -- at "cancel culture," "Hollywood liberals," "liberal support for Hamas" -- he can blast, slam or roast actively (13 times total). On average, a story about Maher's show or his podcast makes the top of the page about every 8.4 days. ABC's "The View," on the other hand, appears about once every 10.3 days, just to remind the faithful that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. It is there to be slammed.

Two college football stories in the top 10 is hardly a surprise. "College football" shows up 98 times, in a headline frequency tie with "Dem-run city," "mass shooting" and "school board." "Golden Bachelor" Gerry Turner should also be a familiar face; he's been in the top 10 stories eight times, starting with the wedding announcement in December 2023. "Home Improvement" only rates five unique stories across the data set ("Little House on the Prairie" has six, in case you're trying to estimate the age of the intended audience).

Turning Point USA is an infrequent player in the data set, which only goes through late June 2025. Turning Point and Charlie Kirk have been constants on the page since Kirk's murder in September, including the five days before this capture. "Freedom wins" doesn't show up in the data set, but its friends do: "Biology wins" was the headline three days earlier on the court decision allowing the ban on "X" passports to continue, and "Faith wins" shows up 13 times, usually with a subhed like "Religious groups hail victory after deadline passes for Biden admin to appeal transgender ruling." We can put "Freedom wins" and its ilk in the "fourth wall" category; winning tells us who the good guys are.

Is there room for a lifestyle section? Yes, in a way. No complaints about unruly flyers or people unwilling to give up the aisle seat today (yes, Reddit is more or less the Dear Abby of the Fox homepage). Celebrities are especially prone to opening up: 119 unique headlines across the study period, compared with only 32 cases where people or corporations come clean. "Check your fridge" is rare, even if food recalls themselves are not. All in all, it's not an unstretchable stretch from the classic "family, food, fashion and furniture" (Voss, 2014) of the old newspaper days.

And there's some actual news, even if it's Trump adding random zeroes to numbers he doesn't understand in a social media post.

Methodology reminders: The layout of the Fox homepage has varied. In 2022, there were five stories at the top before a hurdle of paid content. That changed to seven stories briefly in early 2023, then to the 10-story layout you see today. 2022 and early 2023 had anywhere from six to nine captures a day; as the top of the page grew, I dialed that back and settled on four captures a day in mid-2023. The total is 50,883 screen captures through June 24. I'm still stashing four pages a day and may go back and add some more for analysis.

In addition to the attention-getting hed inset on the illustration, I'm also coding the summary hed beneath, position on the page, source of the key information in the story, and whether the story is new or repeated (the same story can get an entirely new illustration and hed treatment to become more Fox-worthy). There's also a "fourth wall" variable, roughly operationalized as whether the headlines tell the reader what to think -- "freedom wins," for example -- rather than what to think about.

* In one highly unusual case, social media is actually disturbed by Kristi Noem killing her dog.

** I haven't been that impressed since "Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death," but your mileage may vary.