The United States is on the brink of a new war in the Middle East based on the lies of President Donald Trump’s administration. Over the past two nights, however, Fox News’ biggest stars have been more interested in alleging that the left is insufficiently supportive of the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team.

Trump has assembled a huge military force in the Middle East for a potential “massive, weeks-long campaign” against Iran. The prospect of a new war has divided Trump’s right-wing media allies, with Fox’s Sean Hannity and Mark Levin loudly calling for military strikes while others argue that the president has not made a compelling case for doing so. Indeed, while the administration has made little effort to explain why the U.S. should attack Iran, key portions of its case — “that Iran has restarted its nuclear program, has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days, and is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States” — are “false or unproven,” as The New York Times noted Thursday. 

The situation is clearly moving to a flashpoint. U.S.-Iranian negotiations ended without a deal on Thursday, which Fox chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin had said would mean that “the U.S. will likely be at war in the Middle East by next week.”

But on Wednesday and Thursday nights, Fox news programs airing between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. devoted only about 19 minutes combined to the prospect of U.S. strikes against Iran, according to a Media Matters review. By contrast, the same programs devoted 48 minutes total to U.S. Olympic hockey stories. Fox’s Trump propagandists sought to associate the president with the gold-winning U.S. men’s hockey team, castigate the media and Democrats for supposedly being insufficiently supportive of the squad, and assure viewers that the gold-winning U.S. women’s hockey team was not refusing to go to the White House due to “TDS” (meaning Trump derangement syndrome).

Notably, the programs hosted by right-wing favorites Jesse Watters and Laura Ingraham did not cover the Iran story at all, while spending 8 and 15 minutes, respectively, on hockey reports (The Five spent 20 seconds discussing the prospect of a U.S. war with Iran, which we rounded down to zero for this study). 

Here are some screen grabs from Fox’s hockey discussions:

Methodology

Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original weekday episodes of The Five, Special Report with Bret Baier, The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, and Hannity (we excluded Gutfeld! because the format is primarily comedy rather than news) for any of the terms “Iran,” “Tehran,” “supreme leader,” or “nuclear” from February 25, 2026, the day after President Donald Trump delivered new threats against Iran during his State of the Union address, through February 26, 2026.

We also searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original weekday episodes of The Five, Special Report with Bret Baier, The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, and Hannity for either of the terms “hockey” or “Team USA” for the same time period.

We timed segments, which we defined as when either the potential conflict with Iran or the U.S. men's or women's hockey teams were the stated topic 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 in the segment engaging with the comment, and teasers, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host promoted a segment about any of the stories to air later in the broadcast. 

We rounded all times to the nearest minute.