Fox News has continued to obsess over an American Eagle advertisement featuring Sydney Sweeney talking about her “good jeans,” spending 4 hours and 50 minutes discussing the ad since July 28. By comparison, Fox has devoted just 40 minutes to covering continuing developments related to the fallout from the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Fox has continued to highlight “backlash” against the ad campaign, citing social media users and Instagram comments on a post from Sweeney about her dog to anchor the network’s continued coverage of the topic. After President Donald Trump weighed in on Sweeney and the ad, a surge of coverage followed on Fox, with hosts seemingly thrilled that the president has kept the story in the news.

Coverage of the administration’s handling of the ongoing Epstein story has remained much lower than coverage of Sweeney’s ad, with Fox dedicating just 40 minutes of coverage to the story since July 28 despite a spate of new developments. When Fox did discuss the Epstein story, coverage frequently focused on a House panel subpoenaing the Clintons over their connections to the convicted sex offender.

Fox's obsession with Sweeney has also overshadowed other arguably more pressing issues like rising grocery prices, to which Fox dedicated just a minute of coverage over the same time period, even while polling shows a vast majority of Americans are concerned about the price of groceries.

Week two of the Fox News obsession with the Sweeney ad campaign has continued to allow Fox to shift the conversation away from potentially damaging topics to Trump and his administration by continuing to feed their base culture war distractions.
 

Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original programming on Fox News Channel for any of the terms “Sydney,” “Sweeney,” “American Eagle,” “jeans,” or “denim” within close proximity of any of the terms “ad,” “advertisement,” “commercial,” “fall,” “campaign,” “genes,” “eugenics,” “boobs,” “blue,” or “Nazi,” as well as searching for any mention of “Epstein” or “Maxwell,” as well as searching for any of the terms “food,” “supermarket,” or any variation of the word “grocery” within close proximity of any of the terms “cost,” “price,” “dollar,” “amount,” “poll,” or any variation of the word “stress,” from July 28, 2025, through 11 AM E.T. on August 7, 2025.

We timed segments, which we defined as instances when either the American Eagle 2025 fall ad campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney, rising grocery prices, or the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein story were the stated topics of discussion or when we found significant discussion of any of the stories. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed any of the stories with one another.

We also timed mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker in a segment on another topic mentioned any of the stories without another speaker engaging with the comment, and teasers, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host promoted a segment about any of the stories scheduled to air later in the broadcast.

We rounded all times to the nearest minute.