The network as a broadcast platform
Fox News enters the excerpts first as infrastructure rather than as a subject of argument. In the opening of a 2010 episode, Bob Zadek identifies his own program by its dial position and network: he welcomes listeners to the Bob Zadek Show, Sunday at noon on 910 AM Fox News Radio in the Bay Area and on the web around the country, describing it as the leading libertarian talk radio show in the Bay Area and the show of ideas, not attitude A Libertarian Plan (2010). The same episode’s stated topic is the constitutional limits of federal power, contrasting James Madison’s “few and defined” powers with modern expansive interpretations, and proposing specific cuts to the federal budget, including eliminating housing subsidies, agricultural payouts, and the FCC, to balance the budget without raising taxes A Libertarian Plan (2010).
A later episode places Zadek on a different station while retaining the same self-description. Guest-hosting a program in 2023, he tells listeners he is host of the Bob Zadek Show, which broadcasts every Sunday on KFAX’s sister station, 8:60 AM, The Answer, at 8:00 AM Pacific Time, and notes that all of his shows are stored at the Bob Zadek Show podcast [[episodes/life_line___guest_hosting__robert_mahoney_on__the|Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023)]]. The excerpts thus show the program’s affiliation changing over time, but they do not describe that change or explain it.
Fox News as one pole of a media landscape
Where Fox News is named as a subject, it is almost always paired with an opposite number. In a 2011 episode, a caller from San Francisco named Chris asks why everything is shaped into a left-right discussion about television and media, and says that people who are hard on the right will listen to Fox while he, being left, will listen to MSNBC, and that this amounts to re-propagating the same things over and over again Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011). Ben Shapiro responds that he does not think it is binary, and that Hollywood tends to take a liberal line Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011). Zadek then frames the discussion around Shapiro’s focus on what Zadek calls a very artificial subset of a couple of zip codes in the United States, rather than a cross-section of points of view Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011).
The same episode’s guest turns to the economics of television advertising. Shapiro argues that the industry has made the case to advertisers that the only viewers that are worthwhile at all are people who are aged 18 to 49, that the people in the country who currently have disposable income are all 50 and above, and that the highest unemployment rate in the country right now is people aged 18 to 34 Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011). He adds that the Nielsens came out themselves about two months earlier and said there is zero correlation, none, between spending habits and age Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011). Fox News is not mentioned in that exchange; it appears in the episode only through the caller’s pairing of it with MSNBC.
Fox News and the collapse of shared reality
By 2021 the network appears as an example of a broader phenomenon. In an episode on the Capitol riot, Nick Gillespie tells Zadek that people can now live their entire lives in a community of the like-minded, and that this can become really bad, citing an Alex Jones-type character, or Fox News in a less extreme way, or MSNBC and The New York Times on the other side of the aisle, where all you are doing is confirming your existing sense of the world or burnishing it a little bit The Capitol Riot in Context (2021). Gillespie also resists any attempt to create a golden age of American journalism, saying he is glad that the days are long past where any single source has that much power, and noting that even The Drudge Report does not have the clout it once had The Capitol Riot in Context (2021). He adds that what the best journalism does is force us to consider the world as it is rather than the way we want it to be, and that there is more good journalism and good media out there across every possible level, but that it is also less effective because people have more options The Capitol Riot in Context (2021).
A 2023 episode repeats the pairing in the context of the pandemic. Robert Mahoney, discussing his book The Infodemic, says the biggest thing people should take away from the pandemic is the collapse of trust between the public and institutions, whether government, health institutions, or the media [[episodes/life_line___guest_hosting__robert_mahoney_on__the|Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023)]]. He says the information available to Americans was largely in two camps, on the right or on the left, that social media amplified a lot of the misinformation and the lies in the middle, and that this left people confused [[episodes/life_line___guest_hosting__robert_mahoney_on__the|Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023)]]. He describes states where people did not take the pandemic as seriously as others, did not wear masks or observe social distancing, and other states that were locked down tight like a drum [[episodes/life_line___guest_hosting__robert_mahoney_on__the|Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023)]]. Mahoney attributes part of the problem to the loss of local newspapers, saying the United States has lost thousands and thousands of them over the last 15 years to the point where we now talk about news deserts, where there are no local newspapers and no local reporters [[episodes/life_line___guest_hosting__robert_mahoney_on__the|Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023)]]. In that passage he names Fox News on the one side and MSNBC on the other as what remains for a reader in a news desert [[episodes/life_line___guest_hosting__robert_mahoney_on__the|Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023)]].
Across episodes
Four episodes touch on Fox News, and the excerpts show no development in the treatment: the 2010 episode names it only as the host’s radio affiliate, the 2011 episode uses it as one half of a caller’s left-right pairing, and the 2021 and 2023 episodes cite it as an example of a media environment that confirms prior beliefs. No guest or host in these excerpts discusses the network’s ownership, programming, or history, and no position advanced in an earlier episode is revised or answered in a later one.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe Fox News as a business, a cable channel, or a newsgathering organization, and they give no founding date, owner, or executive. They contain no discussion of any Fox News program, host, or controversy, and no assessment of the network’s accuracy beyond its use as an example of like-minded media. The only concrete institutional fact the sources supply is that the Bob Zadek Show aired on a Fox News Radio affiliate in the Bay Area in 2010.