What does the Fox Say? A mixed-methods framing analysis of Fox News’ coverage of domestic terrorism, 2012-2022

Abstract: This paper investigates Fox News’ television coverage of domestic terrorism in the United States from 2012 to 2022. This period spans the terms of both Republican and Democratic Presidents, the COVID-19 pandemic, large-scale civil protests, and the emergence of rightwing extremism as the foremost domestic terror threat. The empirical analysis is based on 287 transcripts from 24 Fox News shows. The study engages a deductive, quantitative content analysis of four specific news frames: sourcing, contextualization, ideological labels, and definitional certainty. Five emphasis frames (attribution of blame, conservatives under attack, questioning intelligence agencies, radical Islam, and rightwing extremism is not a threat) are also investigated through an inductive, qualitative content analysis. Quantitative results indicate that the use of specific sources has shifted over time, the contextualization of domestic terror incidents has switched from references to other foreign terror to other domestic terror, ideological labels are applied to the left while there is hesitancy to apply rightwing labels, and that definitional certainty in coverage has increased over time. Qualitative results indicate that the network’s coverage of Islamic and leftwing extremism is consistently thematic, while rightwing extremism is framed episodically and left as unconstructed terrorism despite the significant increase in incidences of rightwing domestic terror over the sample period. Further qualitative results indicate marked increases in the prevalence of three additional emphasis frames: attribution of blame to the left, conservatives are under attack, and questioning the integrity of intelligence agencies.