Fox News has mentioned Hunter Biden at least 13,440 times since January 3, 2023, when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives after promising to use their power to investigate the business interests of President Joe Biden’s son, according to a Media Matters review. The network’s nonstop Hunter fixation prodded House Republicans to launch an impeachment inquiry based on related conspiracy theories in September. But the investigation has failed to identify compelling evidence of wrongdoing by the president, and is now reportedly in an advanced state of collapse.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who has led the impeachment probe, recently told a colleague he is “ready to be 'done with' the impeachment inquiry,” as the inquiry “appears to be at a dead end, with Republicans resigned to the reality that they don’t have the votes to impeach the president,” CNN reported Wednesday. “He seemed to think he had a lot of stuff that just seemed to indicate some things that needed to be investigated. I don’t know what happened,” one GOP lawmaker said of the House Oversight chair.
Fox’s airwaves played an essential role in Comer’s effort, serving as a promotional vehicle for the dubious allegations about Hunter Biden — and for the congressman himself. Comer appeared on Fox weekday programs at least 137 times since the start of the 118th Congress, regularly promising that he had obtained damaging evidence about the Bidens only for his claims to wither under scrutiny. But those interviews have dried up as the probe faltered — Comer had only 3 Fox weekday appearances in March and only 1 thus far this month.
Fox’s on-air coverage of Hunter Biden has likewise plummeted in recent months. Mentions of the president’s son on the network peaked at 2,356 in July, when his federal plea deal on two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay taxes fell apart, and mentions exceeded 1,300 in four other months, most recently in December.
But Fox’s references to Hunter Biden have fallen every month this year — from 786 mentions in January, to 512 in February, to 347 in March, and finally to only 60 this month through April 23. Over that period, a key House GOP witness was arrested for fabricating his claims that a Ukrainian oligarch had paid the Bidens millions of dollars in bribes, a high-profile impeachment hearing produced so little new information that even Fox’s anchors suggested it might be time to “cut bait,” and House Republicans started throwing Comer under the bus.
