On October 6, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report for September. The numbers were extremely positive, with 336,000 jobs added, almost double the forecast. Most media outlets were reporting the numbers as a sign of improvement in the economy—which they are. But Fox reported otherwise. On his prime-time show that night, host Jesse Watters called the report “a straight-up scandal.” He accused the Biden administration of “cherry-picking and double counting the numbers.” As he babbled, chyrons drove home the point in capital letters, for anyone watching with the sound down, in, say, a bar or a gym: “Biden’s Jobs Numbers Scandal” and “Biden’s Economy Is Smoke & Mirrors.”

That day, the network flooded all its zones with the same shade. A Fox Business segment hosted Strategic Wealth Partners “investment strategist” Luke Lloyd, who opined that the good numbers merely proved Joe Biden’s socialism. “My reaction? We are becoming a more socialistic country, and these job numbers prove it,” he said. “We’re taking jobs from the private sector and creating them in the public sector. And who’s financing those jobs? Me, you, and the viewers, through inflation…. Government spending is going to keep inflation in the game.”

Fox’s online articles even used the good news to bash Biden for alleged character flaws and promote Donald Trump. One article online that day quoted a variety of MAGA social media posts, including an X post: “Biden is a pathological liar. Every sane American can confidently state that they were financially better off under Trump.”

All that was just Day One. For the next week, the network served up a chorus of boos for the unemployment numbers. The next morning, hosts of Fox & Friends Weekend discussed the U.S. employment data over a chyron announcing, “Biden Criticized Over Handling of Economy.” Host Will Cain reported that the good jobs numbers were actually very bad news in a period of “runaway inflation,” and that more people working was simply going to drive up prices even further. “I got to tell you, when I’m out there talking to friends who are either in real estate or financing, there’s a great amount of fear about this economy and what could happen over the next 12 months ... inflation goes high and interest rates goes high.”

As we head into the 2024 election, this is the messaging tone we can expect the nation’s most-watched cable network to spew hourly. No matter who the Republicans run, Fox will exist as an open adversary to Joe Biden—his other opponent. The network has always gone after Democrats—it did this to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore. But this election year is different. It is a crisis for American democracy, a crisis that is in no small part Fox’s making. And it’s not clear that Democrats have any plan for how to handle their other—perhaps even the stronger—2024 adversary.

From its earliest days, Fox energized the conservative vote and pushed nonaligned voters into the Republican fold. A study of almost 10,000 U.S. towns, among the first to get Fox on cable between its 1996 launch and 2000, found a “significant” change in voting behavior affecting both the Republican vote share in the Senate and voter turnout. The researchers estimated Fox persuaded between 3 and 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican.

What they didn’t know then was how long it would last, and that it would become a mass radicalization operation. “The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion,” the authors wrote. Almost three decades on, we know the effect was permanent—and has only gotten more entrenched and extreme. “Fox operates as an adversary to Biden and Democrats every day,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “The single biggest predictor of attitudes that climate change is not human-caused is watching Fox. We include it in our polling as a variable. And it is the number one news source of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.”

The Dominion lawsuit settlement cost Fox a cool $787.5 million. The money was perhaps less damaging to the brand than the evidence. The plaintiffs acquired texts and emails showing a “news” division reporting statements it knew to be lies as fact, anchors being deeply cynical about journalistic practice, and an enterprise willing to take a sledgehammer to the foundation of American democracy—trust—all in order to keep its lucrative position as broadcaster to the MAGA movement. In the wake of the settlement, Fox is a “news” operation in name only. It has dispensed with all standard practice. It routinely ignores landmark events—congressional hearings on the worst assault on the seat of American democracy since the war of 1812, indictments of a former president, numerous guilty pleas by fascist insurrectionists, for example—if they are unfavorable to MAGA.

But MAGA promotion isn’t the only thing, or even the main thing. Fox is an anti-Biden meme factory. If Biden pauses during a speech, or appears to lose his footing on a podium, the network will cut and loop the video for hours, making the president look demented, as every guest is invited to banter about his age. “They frame him as both a doddering old fool who is suffering from dementia and a mastermind who is secretly plotting things,” said Juliet Jeske, among a small group of researchers who log Fox broadcasts daily.

When Fox isn’t looping selectively cut video of Biden, it is trying to prove he is such an evil genius that he pulled off a grand financial scheme with his son without leaving a trace. At other times, Biden is a mere front man, and Obama is secretly running his administration.

No amount of good economic news penetrates the wall of anti-administration sound. The effect of Fox’s selective coverage on Biden’s favorability is quantifiable. A Harris poll in September—with unemployment at historic lows—asked Americans one question: Do you think unemployment is at a 50-year high? Sixty percent of Republicans said yes. And so did 40 percent of Democrats. While Fox can’t take credit for all this, its relentless hourly assault on factual good news about the economy is surely a factor.

“To see such a separation from reality about an objective measure of fact is disturbing and an indictment of how Americans are underinformed, misinformed, and disinformed,” said anti-Fox activist Milo Vassallo, a New York allergist who was so outraged by Fox that he became a founding member of an anti-Fox organization called the Media and Democracy Project, or MAD. “Where is the White House in messaging labor statistics? It is doing what it can do in an information environment that needs engagement and clicks and is designed for algorithmic engagement,” he said. “But 98 percent of Democrats and 99 percent of its donors have absolutely ceded the battleground in the information war.”

Vassallo raises the key question. Is the Biden campaign, are the Democrats generally, ready for this? A debate rages right now in Democratic circles about how the party and its officials should deal with Fox—to refuse to appear on the network and instead expose the corruption at its heart, or to play ball with it and try to outsmart it. There are good arguments on both sides. Wherever Biden and his people come down, they need to do so understanding that Fox isn’t merely an unfriendly media property. It’s an opponent, and one with a press pass and the First Amendment to shield its lies.

Fox operating as an open adversary to a Democratic president wasn’t exactly unexpected. Rupert Murdoch came to the United States in the 1970s after building a media empire in Australia and the U.K. That empire was erected on a then-novel concept: that giving consumers the news they want to hear makes money. London newsstands sold seven or eight different newspapers, each providing a specific political take on how the world works. Murdoch’s insight was to recognize that, in the media business, confirmation bias was a quicker pound. Soon it would be a quicker buck.

By the mid-1980s, Murdoch was buying up local broadcasting stations to form what would become the Fox Broadcasting Company, and ultimately, on cable, the Fox News Channel. Murdoch cloaked his ambitions in the guise of free speech: Fox would be the nation’s fourth network, offering viewers and advertisers another option besides the three networks and PBS. The FCC had long supported the idea that American consumers needed more broadcast sources, but it hadn’t seemed financially feasible until Murdoch came along and made it happen—chiefly by acquiring some of the Sunday afternoon football rights in 1993, when he massively outbid the previous holder of those rights, CBS.

Soon, he had almost 30 broadcast licenses and Sunday football. The channel started out innocuously enough, broadcasting The Simpsons and other entertainment created by the studio 20th Century-Fox, which Murdoch had also bought.

Creating Fox Broadcast, Murdoch’s lawyers and lobbyists surmounted a variety of regulatory and legal hurdles. Murdoch owned too many media concerns in some of the broadcast areas. So he finagled waivers of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, or Fin-Syn. He was not an American citizen (easily overcome with the “fastest citizenship application granted in history,” as one of his counselors at the time joked to me). But his company, News Corp, still owned 99 percent of the equity in the Fox stations. When he was challenged on that, in the mid-1990s, he applied for and was granted by the FCC a waiver based on the assumption that his fourth network was “in the public interest.”

Preston Padden was Murdoch’s chief lobbyist through most of those years, one of the men who helped him get the broadcast licenses and waivers. “I believed 1,000 percent of what we were doing in building a fourth free-over-the-air broadcast network,” he says now. “I believed that was good for viewers. It gave them another choice; it was good for advertisers, it gave them another choice; it was good for local stations and good for America.”

Today, though, Padden is an anti-Trump Republican who argues that Fox violates a public interest requirement for U.S. broadcast license ownership. He has joined with progressives and other former or Never Trump Republicans in trying to get the FCC to yank one of those licenses, in Philadelphia, which happens to be the only one up for renewal at this time.

“For the first time in FCC history, an applicant for a broadcast license renewal has been found by a judge [in the Dominion lawsuit] to have broadcast false news,” Padden said. “Can you imagine Walter Cronkite broadcasting false news every night?”

The list of informal objectors in the challenge to Murdoch’s license includes former FCC Chairman Alfred C. Sikes, who was appointed by George H.W. Bush and served between 1989 and 1993. He not only regrets his role, but he has abandoned the Republican Party altogether. “I was in favor [of waivers for Murdoch], because in the network world there was only PBS, ABC, NBC, [and] CBS,” Sikes told me. “Broadcast was dominant, the leading forces in information. And I thought having a fourth network would be a good thing.”

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