Fox News Caught Citing Fake News Outlet on Air (2025)

Fox and its business affiliates have apparently shed any pretense of relying on verifiable sources of information for their on-air claims.

During Tuesday’s episode of Mornings with Maria, host Maria Bartiromo cited a news source that isn’t just controversial—it’s actually not news whatsoever.

“I want to get your take on whether you’ve got confidence there, in Arizona, because apparently The Gateway Pundit reported that the GOP chairwoman provided an update to allegations that there’s not going to be a fair election there,” Bartiromo said to RNC Co-Chair Michael Whatley, basing the information on a conspiracy site well known for publishing hoaxes.

The Gateway Pundit filed for bankruptcy in April amid several defamation suits, including one brought by a pair of 2020 Georgia election workers, mother-daughter duo Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who won a nearly $150 million suit against ex-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani on similar claims.

The site is also under the gun for another lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which accused Gateway Pundit of publishing defamatory stories about its voting machines during the last presidential election.

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance already has a major setback in his Tuesday matchup against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz: Nobody seems to like him.

Favorability ratings aggregated by CNN political analyst Harry Enten indicate that the country’s opinion of Vance is appallingly low, at -11 percentage points, lower than any other politician currently in the race for the White House.

That makes Vance the least liked vice presidential pick in modern U.S. history at this point in the race—that is, before he’s even had a proper face-off against his opponent. He’s also the second vice presidential pick with a net negative favorability, preceded only by Dan Quale in 1988, who actually had a stronger position than Vance before his first debate with a -3 percent favorability rating.

Walz, meanwhile, is soaring. The “Midwestern Dad” ranked head and shoulders above the favorability ratings of everyone else in the race, including Vice President Kamala Harris, with a +4 percent favorability rating.

Enten’s analysis also suggested that 72 percent of polled Americans believed that Walz has the upper hand in Tuesday night’s debate, making Vance an aggressive underdog with just 28 percent of the country thinking he stands a chance of winning.

Vance’s aggressive rhetoric, baseless conspiracies, and just plain weird comments have rubbed Americans the wrong way in the months since he was selected to be Donald Trump’s right-hand man. The Republican vice presidential pick has ardently defended his position that childless adults should not hold positions of power as they don’t have a “direct stake” in the future of the country, and derided Democratic Party leaders as “childless cat ladies.”

He also invented a lie about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, that has sparked at least 33 bomb threats to the sleepy city, forcing it to evacuate and temporarily shutter several of its schools, colleges, festivals, and a significant portion of its government facilities, including City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Ohio License Bureau, the Springfield Academy of Excellence, and Fulton Elementary School.

And Vance’s more general appearances out in public have done everything but humanize him to the country’s voting class. In August, the MAGA Republican’s quick stop for some glazed donuts in a Georgia shop ended up going viral when it became clear that the visit—and his general abrasiveness—was making a couple of people behind the counter painfully uncomfortable.

The Democratic National Convention is apparently trying to goad Donald Trump, resurrecting old pranks against the Republican presidential nominee just hours before his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, is scheduled to go toe-to-toe against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

On Monday night, the liberal party projected a series of biting taglines onto a panel outside Trump’s New York City residence on Fifth Avenue.

“Trump is a chicken,” the projection read.

The projection reportedly appeared just hours after Vance arrived at Trump Tower for the debate, which will take place Tuesday night, without an audience, at CBS Broadcast Center in Manhattan.

Some of the other jabs flashed through the projection included references to Vance’s old tweets, including one in which he referred to Trump as an “idiot,” and stabs at Trump’s ongoing affinity for Project 2025, a 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto intended to help him to install far-right policies in the executive branch as seamlessly as possible should he win in November.

“Vance on Trump: ‘What an idiot’,” the signage said.

Democrats did something similar in August, branding Trump Tower in Chicago with giant messages during the Democratic National Convention. Those phrases included: “Trump-Vance: Out for Themselves,” as well as “Trump-Vance: ‘Weird as Hell,’” “Harris-Walz: Fighting for You,” and “Project 2025 HQ.”

But Monday night’s prank has a more direct objective than simply trolling the Republican ticket. Instead, it’s transparent bait for Trump, who has flat-out rejected the idea of debating Vice President Kamala Harris again after his first performance against her turned unbelievably sour, frustrating his team, allies, and donors.