A sleeping media giant may be about to wake up: Fox News’ website — known for its high traffic, but not strong identity —is staffing up and sharpening its voice in hopes of equaling the impact of its increasingly pro-Trump television partner.

A website that had been more closely identified with Shepard Smith’s brand of reporting has now moved closer to the mold of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, according to former staff members who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The approach has gone much more the way the prime-time programming works,” said one, “where it feels more agenda or opinion driven, or combative.”


According to Noah Kotch, who took over six months ago as Fox News digital editor in chief and vice president, his staff has grown to more than 100 full-time staffers, an increase of about 45 percent in the past year. The ramp-up signals that digital is now a major priority for Rupert Murdoch’s news outlet, Kotch said, adding that there is an increased focus on collaboration with TV.

“The digital side of Fox, they weren’t investing as much for many, many years, I think that’s widely known,” Kotch said. “We’re finally staffing up, we’re getting all the resources that we really need to be competitive, which we didn’t have before.”

In the process, the website has “gone a little Breitbart,” said Jonathan Albright, the research director at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Albright studied and mapped out the online news ecosystem during the 2016 election, finding then that Foxnews.com was a “traditional conservative” site. Since, he said, “they’ve gotten more on the Trump bandwagon.”

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Kotch denied any ideological slant. “We’re covering the news,” he said.


But multiple former staffers reached by POLITICO pointed to a persistent focus on Hillary Clinton and alleged flaws in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, with lead stories blaring headlines like “FUSION COLLUSION” and “HILLARY’S SLUSH FUND.”

During the day on Monday, for instance, the website provided full coverage of the Amtrak derailment in Washington state, but by evening, while most other news outlets were still focused on the deadly crash, Foxnews.com had flipped to a lead headline that read: “JUMPING THE GUN? Holder, liberal activists gear up for Mueller firing with protest plans.”

And last week, when Trump visited the FBI headquarters to deliver a speech, the lead headline on the site asked if he was entering, “ENEMY TERRITORY.”

Former staff members also described an ideological slant in the framing of stories that they don’t believe existed before Trump, or the hiring of Kotch in June.


One example came when House Republicans passed their tax bill on Wednesday. The site’s lead headline was openly celebratory, declaring, “RELIEF IN SIGHT.” Later in the day, the top story shifted to “anti-Trump bias allegations” against Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

One former editor was particularly upset over the headline of an October story about North Korean nuclear scientists, which referred to them as, “Rocket men.” The former editor was dismayed that the site would adopt one of Trump’s favorite insults as its own language.

Kotch denied that Fox News digital has exhibited bias or done anything but cover the news. “There are some places out there, big major organizations that are very, very, very aggressively being oppositional and being very, very aggressive and sometimes shrill. We don’t want to take that tone, we don’t want to talk down to our readers,” he said.

One high-profile incident occurred the morning after Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore in Alabama’s special Senate election. Foxnews.com buried news of the result on its site, a fact that was widely noted on Twitter.

“I don’t think we would have buried a story like that back in the old days, so to speak,” said another former editor at the site, who left during the Obama administration. Previously, he said, the approach would have been to run a straight news story of interest to conservatives, similar to the one Fox led the site with later that same day — after taking heavy criticism— about Republican senators wooing Jones for his vote.

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Kotch said he “didn’t notice” the story of Moore’s defeat being downplayed the day after the election. “I thought we were covering it pretty intentionally. Some other people were covering it gleefully. I think we were covering it in a serious way.”

Kotch also defended Fox News digitals’ coverage of Mueller and Clinton.

“The same legitimacy questions were being aggressively thrown at Ken Starr that are being thrown now at Bob Mueller,” he said. “This is par for the course for an independent counsel investigation … I think that the legitimacy of his operation is a legitimate story.”


As for Clinton, he said, “I don’t think we stand out in terms of the amount of coverage that’s being given to her.”

“She is the person who has continued to be in the media. She wants to be in the media. She just published a huge book. She’s doing a huge press tour of enormous interest. If you look at the Web traffic, if you look at what people are clicking on, they’re extremely interested in her. She is effectively at this point the shadow leader of her party, for want of anyone else. It’s a legitimate story that we’re going to cover,” he said.

As the de facto home page for conservatives, Fox News Digital regularly ranks as one of comScore’s most visited news outlets. This year has been Fox’s best ever, with a 29 percent increase in average monthly unique visitors and a 17 percent jump in page views, year over year. In October, 96 million unique users visited according to comScore, making it the most highly trafficked month in Fox News history.

The site still usually comes in behind rival CNN.com, though, which boasts a staff about six times larger than Fox’s, with 600 employees. In October, CNN digital reached 119 million unique users.

And a Harvard and MIT study of the digital news ecosystem during the 2016 election found that Breitbart, not Foxnews.com, was the biggest driver of social media discourse on the right. For all of Fox News’ traffic, more people were sharing and linking to Steve Bannon’s site, the researchers found.





Kotch took over the site in June, after Murdoch recruited him from NewsCorp’s libertarian site, Heat Street. He previously worked at ABC News, where he was Peter Jennings’ head writer and held several other digital and TV positions there, and NBC News, where he oversaw the key 7 o’clock hour of “Today” as a senior producer. The New York Times reported that, during that time, he became known to critics as “the trash doctor,” for his love of TMZ-esque stories. Foxnews.com has adopted a pulpier tone under his leadership; the site set off a minor Twitter frenzy last month when it published a story exploring a “wild conspiracy theory” about whether the Apollo 11 moon landing was faked.

Kotch pushed back on the trash doctor characterization, saying, “I am proud of my years at 'Today,'” and “I always acted in the best interests of the show.” He also called the pushback to the moon landing story “ludicrous,” saying it never seriously suggested the landing was faked, and that, “Fox News can have fun, too.”


Kotch also disagreed that FoxNews.com lacked an identity, but said he would like to import more of the attitude of Heat Street.

“I would like to get as much of the verve and spunk that we had over there over here,” he said. “I think we’re getting more of it.”

Adding bodies will also allow Fox News to produce more digital content, he said.

“We’ve added a significant amount of staff both in the writing and producing area and on the technical and product side,” Kotch said. “We’ve been increasing the metabolism quite intensely, increasing our coordination with our colleagues on the channel side. We’re just raring to go.”

In September, the Fox News website launched a redesign, intended to more prominently feature video from the cable network.

Since that time, Kotch said, his operation has also gone for the first time to a full 24-hour schedule. And in late January, the digital staff is scheduled to move into a new shared newsroom with the TV side, the first time the two will occupy the same space. A redesigned version of the Fox News app is also scheduled to launch this spring.

“I want us to be increasingly at the forefront of breaking news, exclusive stories,” Kotch said, helping drive news cycles both digitally and on TV. “I think the more coordination we have, the better. It gets better every week.”

Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor, was part of the group with MIT that studied how readers consumed news online during the 2016 election, and said that Fox News has an incentive to move to the right.


Analyzing linking and sharing patterns of 1.25 million stories, his group found that Fox News and Breitbart formed the heart of “a relatively insular and self-referential” online news ecosystem. In other words, people reading, sharing and linking to Fox News and Breitbart were, for the most part interacting only with other right-wing news sites, and not mainstream outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, or even Wall Street Journal. That means, Benkler said, that conservatives are Fox News’ only potential audience.

During the primary, when Fox News was more critical of Trump — and Breitbart turned against Fox, attacking it in several headlines — Benkler said the site’s influence decreased. “Fox News became less prominent, fewer Twitter shares, fewer Facebook shares,” he said. But that changed during the general election. “It’s only when they line up, after Trump essentially wins out, that they return to their position of prominence,” he said. “In many senses, it was a capitulation of Fox News to the Breitbart line.”

“If you’re seeing major changes now,” Benkler said, “it makes sense as a competitive strategy.”

Kotch dismissed the study as “ludicrous,” and said, “I have no comment about it.”

His goal, he said, is for Fox’s digital properties to be respected by users across the political spectrum.

“I would like us to be viewed as a serious competitor. We are aggressive, we want to win,” he said. “We’ve been given the resources that we need to win.”

Kotch also insisted that he is not getting orders from above.

“Nobody’s telling me about a narrative. I remember narrative from my literature class in college,” he said. “I’m coming in every day being like, ‘What’s the big story of the day? What’s really interesting? What’s compelling? What is the audience hungering for?’”

