For the second day in a row, Fox News host Gretchen Carlson criticized the GOP for failing to effectively communicate its ideas, especially following its defeat in the 2012 presidential election. But while Carlson's comments were directed at the Republican National Committee, Fox itself has acted as the communications arm of the GOP for years, a practice that has opened the network to heavy criticism, especially following Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's recent loss.

On the December 6 edition of Fox & Friends, Carlson claimed that “Republicans actually have a legitimate message” on the issue of raising taxes and cutting entitlements, going so far as to ask if “we need a better mouthpiece for the Republicans to be able to communicate.” On today's show, Carlson revisited her comments, saying that the RNC should do a better job of getting the message out because there “has been a lot of discussion about the communication of the Republican ideas and the effectiveness of that during the campaign.”

But no organization has pushed the message of the Republican Party as strongly as Fox News. In fact, the network came under criticism following November's election that its constant political activism on behalf of the GOP may have harmed the party's electoral results. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf noted that Fox chose to push baseless attacks on President Obama instead of informing conservatives about the real state of the election. Salon.com's Alex Pareene suggested Fox “knows it's constantly lying to its audience” which is “clearly bad for the [conservative] movement in the long term.”

Criticism of Fox as a partisan, political outfit as opposed to a news organization reignited recently after Foreign Policy columnist Tom Ricks criticized the network's attempt to attack Obama over the September 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya. Ricks noted that the story “generally was hyped, by this network especially” and accused Fox of “operating as a wing of the Republican Party.”