Focused On Phony Talarico Conspiracy, Fox Brushes Off New Paxton Scandal
Fox News barely covered Monday's report that Texas attorney general and GOP nominee for U.S. Senate Ken Paxton had partied overseas with two fugitives from U.S. justice — one of whom was a major donor to his campaign — as well as his mistress. Its hosts’ nonchalant reaction to Paxton’s new scandal comes amid their multi-day fixation on his Democratic opponent James Talarico’s temporary absence from the campaign trail due to illness.
The Wall Street Journal, which like Fox is part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, reported late Monday:
As fireworks exploded over the Burj Khalifa skyscraper to welcome 2025, Paxton and his girlfriend Tracy Duhon watched from a luxury high-rise balcony full of people, according to a video of the gathering viewed by The Wall Street Journal, details of which were contained in court filings and confirmed by people familiar with the matter.
Among those at the event with Texas’ top law-enforcement official were two Americans who had been indicted months before on federal healthcare-fraud charges but failed to return to the U.S., Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail, according to the court records and people familiar with the matter. Ahmed, a healthcare executive, had donated $190,000 to Paxton, campaign-finance records show, including $25,000 days after he was indicted.
The Journal’s story, which featured video of Paxton at the event, was widely covered across Texas print and national television news — but not on Fox, which provided a grand total of 1 minute and 33 seconds of airtime to the bombshell as of noon ET on Wednesday. The coverage was limited to network correspondents who referenced the Paxton story during packaged reports on Tuesday's editions of The Story and Special Report and Wednesday's edition of Fox & Friends.
Each Fox segment describes Paxton as having attended a party in Dubai with “two men who had been indicted on federal healthcare fraud charges,” highlights the Paxton campaign’s response that the candidate had been subjected to a “politically motivated attack,” and contrasts the Journal report with Talarico’s absence from the campaign trail the previous week. None of the segments explicitly mention that the men were fugitives, that one of them was a major donor to Paxton’s campaign, that Paxton’s mistress was also present, or that the “attack” originated from another Murdoch-controlled outlet.
Fox stars like Jesse Watters, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity, along with the co-hosts of Fox & Friends, all ignored the story on their programs.
But those Fox hosts do find stories about the Texas Senate race newsworthy — when they emanate from rumormongering by Republicans and MAGA influencers rather than well-sourced accounts from their network's corporate cousins at the Journal.
The underlying facts are incredibly banal. On September 30, Talarico revealed that he had been diagnosed with the flu during a virtual appearance at an event. After eight days at home, he returned to public events on Friday, and on Sunday gave an interview in which he said, “I had the flu.”
But in the days in between and following those appearances, Paxton attempted to turn Talarico’s absence from the trail into a campaign issue, President Donald Trump tossed off some baseless insinuations, and right-wing media went berzerk. “By Sunday, the conservative internet was consumed by an unsubstantiated claim from a right-wing influencer that Mr. Talarico had flown to a mental health facility in Ohio, more than 1,000 miles away from Austin, for treatment of an undisclosed illness,” The New York Times reported.
The Talarico conspiracy theory never made any sense and was thoroughly dismantled by the Times and The Bulwark. But Fox, as a MAGA propaganda front whose hosts are deeply invested in the Texas Senate race, plugged into the GOP effort to turn Talarico staying home with the flu into a major scandal.
While the network’s stars largely avoided citing the most fetid insinuations of the online right, they nonetheless spent several days talking up the Paxton-Trump attack lines. Jesse Watters Primetime and Hannity each covered the story on Thursday, Friday, Monday, and Tuesday; The Ingraham Angle on Friday and Monday; and Fox & Friends on Friday, Monday, and Tuesday.
Talarico’s return to the campaign trail and the collapse of the right’s narrative did little to slow the Fox frenzy — instead, they simply scrounged for new angles. Watters, for instance, said Monday that Talarico’s absence showed he “doesn’t run his own campaign because his staff told him to stay in bed for two weeks” and that he had spent his time “in bed … thinking about all those trans kids.”
By Tuesday, Fox News Digital was acknowledging that the “viral rumor” that Talarico had checked into a mental hospital “has now been debunked” — but cited Republican strategists and a right-wing media figure to frame Talarico’s campaign as the story’s villain for not stopping the frenzy.
Even as late as Wednesday morning — five days after Talarico’s return to the campaign trail — Fox’s America’s Newsroom ran a segment highlighting comments Trump made on the stump about the Democrat’s absence the previous week. The program, putatively part of the network’s “hard news” hours, has not reported on the Journal’s Paxton story.
It turns out that the MAGA media is marbled-through with reprobates who have no interest whatsoever in providing their audiences with truthful information about Democrats — or in reviewing the corruption scandals of Republicans.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
