By almost any measure, the WNBA just had its best season ever. On Fox News, they told a very different story.
Fox News’ fixation on the league dawned on me slowly, especially since I don’t consume Fox News myself.
Background graphic shows roughly 40 examples of Fox News’ cable coverage of the WNBA.
The first clue came at a family gathering. A conservative relative started name-dropping WNBA players, praising superstar Caitlin Clark 
while parroting right-wing conspiracy theories about Black players. This person has never seen a WNBA game in their life. But they do mainline Fox News on cable TV.
Background graphic pulls out and plays four videos with chyron headlines: “Why does the left hate Caitlin Clark?”, “Flagrant fouls against Caitlin Clark continue”, “ WNBA suspends Thomas 1 game after punching Clark”, and “Critics say Caitlin Clark is being snubbed by the WNBA.”
The second clue: my web browser. As I started reading more WNBA news, I was recommended more. That made sense. But then stories from, of all places, Fox News started appearing in my feed.
Background graphic shows roughly 40 examples of Fox News’ online headlines about the WNBA.
Headline after headline pitted Clark , the league’s white, straight-coded star, against other players, almost entirely Black and queer women.
Background graphic shows roughly 40 examples of Fox News’ online headlines about Caitlin Clark. Three headlines are pulled out: “Caitlin Clark fans unload on WNBA, Thomas after violent sequence leaves Fever star battered,” “WNBA star who hurt Caitlin Clark’s eye calls for league to take action against Trump administration policies”, and “Dave Portnoy calls Angel Reese a jacka– for jealousy of Caitlin Clark in response to ESPN analyst.”
Fox News also singled out specific players, framing Angel Reese 
as “entitled” and “laughably bad,” despite Reese being named the 2026 Defensive Player of the Year and reaching the Finals in her third year (notably, before Clark).
Background graphic shows roughly 40 examples of Fox News’ online headlines about Angel Reese. Four headlines are pulled out: “Angel Reese embarrasses herself with cringe video, needs to get a grip: WATCH”, “Why does Angel Reese get a pass for acting like an entitled brat over her dumb Caitlin Clark comment?”, “Don’t be fooled, Angel Reese was laughably bad in another blowout loss”, and “Angel Reese dangerously peddles racist conspiracy theory after WNBA coach calls her two words.”
When it comes to sports, there are, at least seemingly, facts. This team won, and this team lost. This player scored a lot of points. You would expect a lot of similar coverage. But this was different. On their website, Fox News even elevated the WNBA right alongside… literal war.
To measure just how deep this obsession ran, I turned to data.
I analyzed over 30,000 WNBA-related articles from 2019 to 2026 across Fox News (and its sports arm OutKick) against six peer outlets: the Associated Press, CBS (Sports + News), ESPN (+Andscape), The New York Times (+The Athletic), USA Today, and the Washington Post.
To see what was happening on television, I also analyzed thousands of cable news chyrons — the banners running across the bottom of the screen — from Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC (now MS NOW) dating back to 2017. See more in the methods.
on the web
Which players get an outsized share of Fox News’ attention?
on television
The words used in television chyrons
Cable news chyrons, September 2017–November 1, 2026, from the Internet Archive’s Third Eye.
Let’s look at online headlines first. The center line here represents an equal balance. If Fox News and other outlets devoted the exact same percentage of their WNBA coverage to Clark , she would sit right in the middle.
A dot plot showing the share of coverage by players including Sophie Cunningham, DiJonai Carrington, Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark, Natasha Cloud, Brittney Griner, Aliyah Boston, Paige Bueckers, Alyssa Thomas, Kelsey Mitchell, A'ja Wilson, Breanna Stewart, and Napheesa Collier. The X axis ranges from 15× bigger share for other outlets (left) to equal (center) to 15× bigger share for Fox News (right).
Instead, Clark pulls a 3.5× larger share of Fox News’ WNBA headlines than she does across all other outlets combined (the further right a player is, the more heavily they over-index on Fox News).
Clark’s dot moves right to 3.5× bigger share for Fox News.
Other players get an outsized share of Fox News’ attention, too — but largely when they can be plugged into the network’s culture-war machinery.
All other players’ dots move. Sophie Cunningham, DiJonai Carrington, Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark, Natasha Cloud, and Brittney Griner have bigger shares of coverage on Fox News. Aliyah Boston has equal coverage. Paige Bueckers, Alyssa Thomas, Kelsey Mitchell, A'ja Wilson, Breanna Stewart, and Napheesa Collier have bigger shares of coverage by other outlets.
Fox News champions players who match its base. Sophie Cunningham 
draws 10× more headline share on the network than across other mainstream outlets, boosted by her public stance against trans inclusion in sports.
Sophie Cunningham’s dot is highlighted showing 10× bigger share of Fox News headlines.
It turns outspoken players into political lightning rods, obsessing over Natasha Cloud’s 
racial justice activism and Brittney Griner’s 
Russian imprisonment and gender identity.
srText: Natasha Cloud’s dot (3.1× Fox News) and Brittney Griner’s dot (2.1× Fox News) are highlighted, showing bigger shares of Fox News headlines.
It also inflames on-court tension by weaponizing physical play, framing Black players like Reese and DiJonai Carrington 
as hostile or violent toward their white counterparts.
Angel Reese’s dot (3.3× Fox News) and DiJonai Carrington’s dot (6.7× Fox News) are highlighted, showing bigger shares of Fox News headlines.
By contrast, Fox News largely sidelines other dominant players. MVPs and All-Stars like Napheesa Collier 
, Gabby Williams 
, Breanna Stewart 
, and A’ja Wilson 
appear in Fox News headlines at a fraction of their mainstream rate.
Napheesa Collier’s dot (5.2× other outlets), Gabby Williams’ dot (3.8× other outlets), Breanna Stewart’s dot (3.5× other outlets) and A’ja Wilson’s dot (2.0× other outlets) are highlighted, showing bigger shares of other outlets’ headlines.
But digital headlines are only half the picture. What happens when the lens shifts to prime-time cable?
On television, similar patterns emerge. This ternary plot maps chyron mentions across Fox News (top), CNN (bottom-left), and MSNBC (now MS NOW, bottom-right). The center marks balanced coverage; the closer a dot pulls toward a corner, the more exclusively that single network dominates the conversation.
The dot plot turns into a triangle chart of cable news chyrons, with Fox News at the top, CNN at the bottom left and MSNBC at the bottom right. Sophie Cunningham, DiJonai Carrington, Alyssa Thomas, Gabby Williams, A’ja Wilson and Natasha Cloud are in Fox News’ zone. Caitlin Clark sits on the edge of Fox News’ zone. Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers, Kelsey Mitchell, Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier are in CNN’s zone. Brittney Griner and Aliyah Boston are in MSNBC’s zone.
Clark hovers on the Fox News border, with the network accounting for half of her chyron mentions. She serves as an entry point for cultural grievances, especially when paired alongside players who skew even further into Fox News’ territory.
At Fox News’ top apex sits Cunningham , propelled by her public opposition to trans athletes and her reputation as Clark’s “bodyguard.” Fox News routinely pits the two Fever teammates against openly queer Black players like Carrington and Alyssa Thomas 
, sensationalizing fouls as “cheap shots” or malicious.
Sophie Cunningham, DiJonai Carrington and Alyssa Thomas are highlighted, all in Fox News’ zone.
Fox News routinely bypasses the WNBA’s top talent. The network missed obvious editorial layups: it ignored Napheesa Collier calling out league leadership — a critique directly aligned with Fox News’ own anti-WNBA talking points — and overlooked Clark’s backcourt partner, Kelsey Mitchell 
, as she set the all-time single-season scoring record.
Napheesa Collier, Paige Bueckers, Breanna Stewart and Kelsey Mitchell are highlighted in CNN’s zone, and Aliyah Boston in MSNBC’s zone.
An exception among the league's elite is five-time MVP Wilson . Long anchored in CNN territory, her dot swung sharply toward Fox News following an on-court confrontation with a fan during the 2026 playoffs, underscoring how quickly the network tunes in when athletic greatness can be recast as public conflict.
A’ja Wilson’s dot is highlighted, in Fox News’ zone.
Fightin’ Words
Understanding Fox News’ framing means looking beyond who they cover to how they cover them.
To do that, we applied a text-analysis method aptly called “fightin’ words.” The model pinpoints words uniquely tied to a specific outlet, adjusting for corpus size while deemphasizing commonly used jargon (like “head coach”) and rare, low-signal names (like OutKick writer “Dan Dakich”).
Each term receives a measurement that is standardized as a z-score — what we’ll call a “distinctiveness score” — ranking words by how disproportionately one outlet relies on them compared to the rest.
See how Fox News’ top phrases compare across possible methods.
| Rank | Fightin’ wordsWeighted log odds with an informative prior (z-score) | Raw countTimes Fox uses the phrase | Rate differenceFox’s rate minus others’, per 10,000 phrases | Article ratioArticles with the phrase, Fox / others |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | social media | social media | social media | Dan Dakich |
| 2 | white privilege | women’s basketball | women’s sports | stay fearless |
| 3 | black women | women’s sports | women’s basketball | popular because |
| 4 | women’s sports | head coach | Fever star | identity politics |
| 5 | Fever star | national championship | college basketball | Cari Champion |
Plotted side by side, WNBA coverage looks like two parallel universes: all other outlets on the left, Fox News on the right.
A diverging bar chart showing the two-word phrases uniquely used by other outlets (left) vs. Fox News (right).
On the left, other outlets focus on actual basketball, emphasizing game strategy with terms like points, rebounds, and free agency.
Basketball phrases are highlighted on the other outlets’ side, such as scored points, points rebounds, free agency, point guard and fourth quarter. None of Fox News’ phrases are highlighted.
Meanwhile, on the right, Fox News’ vocabulary barely touches on-court play. Its coverage is driven by social media reactions and political flashpoints, leaning heavily into conservative buzzwords like “white privilege,” “national anthem,” and “biological men.”
Four of Fox News’ phrases are highlighted: social media (its top phrase), white privilege, national anthem and biological men.
At the center of this framing sits “Fever star” Clark , whom Fox News repeatedly tethers to its conservative agenda.
“Fever star” is highlighted, the 5th phrase on Fox News’ side.
Beyond overarching themes, how are individual players framed? Stars like Clark are often framed very strategically. There is a “fight over Caitlin Clark’s soul,” as professor Kate Starbird, a misinformation researcher and former WNBA player, put it to me. Starbird and collaborators are currently tracking WNBA “outrage bait” on social media, where Clark is often a centerpiece.
When Clark entered the league in 2024, the culture-war media machinery shifted into overdrive (explore our historical network timeline below). Some commentators suggested that conservative audiences embraced Clark partly because of her background as a straight-presenting, white, Midwestern star. As Courtney M. Cox writes in Double Crossover, “It is essential to highlight how basketball, racialized as a Black sport, still privileges whiteness, especially in media coverage and endorsement.”
Starbird notes that Clark isn’t a “stable” figure for the conservative or liberal media. With a few exceptions, Clark is talked about more than she talks — at least off the court, and not to the refs.
To map how those narratives take shape, we applied the distinctiveness model to specific grammatical roles: how players are described, how their play is characterized, what actions they take, and what is done to them.
Sometimes this is Fox News editorializing directly — “Carrington is a dirty player.” Other times, it captures quoted speech or players defending themselves (“DiJonai Carrington sent a message to fans who think she plays ‘dirty.’”) But with “ragebait” media, the distinction collapses: by highlighting Carrington’s claim that she’s not a dirty player, they incite their audience to insist that she is.
Because these player-specific descriptors appear less frequently overall, some carry lower distinctiveness scores that fall below traditionally used thresholds (indicated by tan bars below). They are included because even words used a handful of times (or fewer) can speak volumes. Fox News characterizing Angel Reese’s play as “pathetic” just three times carries immense weight, especially when no other outlets used the word to describe a player (outside quoted speech) across tens of thousands of articles.
You can see the divergent framing even with specific incidents. When Carrington accidentally poked Clark in the eye during a playoff game, The New York Times (via The Athletic) treated the collision as incidental basketball contact. Fox News, meanwhile, opened with a dramatic scene of Carrington sticking her “long fingernail” into Clark’s eye, burying Clark’s comments about intentionality paragraphs later.
New York TimesCaitlin Clark downplayed being poked in the eye by Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington in Sunday’s WNBA first-round playoff loss, saying her eye “feels good…” “It wasn’t intentional by any means,” Clark said Tuesday. “You just watched the play, it wasn’t intentional.”
Sep 24, 2024 · Article ↗︎
Fox NewsConnecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington stuck her long fingernail in Caitlin Clark's eye during the Sun's 93-69 win over the Indiana Fever Sunday in the WNBA playoffs… Slow-motion footage showed Carrington bending her hand while coming down from the block attempt, pointing her nails in Clark's face.
Sep 24, 2024 · Article ↗︎
CBSCunningham wrapped her up with a hard foul and threw her to the ground, sparking a scuffle between the teams. Cunningham’s foul was upgraded to a Flagrant 2, which comes with an automatic ejection, and Sheldon and Sun guard Lindsay Allen were both ejected as well.
Jun 18, 2025 · Article ↗︎
Fox NewsIndiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham received praise on social media Tuesday night as she appeared to defend Caitlin Clark with a hard foul on Connecticut Sun guard Jacy Sheldon… As the Fever put away the Sun 88-71, Cunningham was congratulated for stepping up as the team’s enforcer.
Jun 18, 2025 · Article ↗︎
ESPNPhoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas has received a flagrant foul 2 penalty and a one-game suspension for "recklessly making contact with her fist to the throat area" of Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark , the WNBA announced Thursday… "We have a generational talent and WNBA superstar who had two cheap shots [against her] right there that weren't called," White said. "Absolutely unacceptable."
Jun 25, 2026 · Article ↗︎
Fox NewsAlyssa Thomas' thug-like play, punching Caitlin Clark in the throat and kneeing her in the groin, is indefensible. The league thought so, and so does the sane general public, who saw the WNBA’s biggest star mugged on the court like she was the victim of some schoolyard bullying... He appears to be implying… that Caitlin Clark receives favorable treatment because she is a generational talent with a massive fan base and because she is white.
Jun 27, 2026 · Article ↗︎
Flip through the coverage to see more diverging moments, including Fox News’ glowing portrayal of Cunningham’s fouls next to their racist description of Alyssa Thomas’s “thug-like play.”
When viewers take that outrage into the real world, the consequences are dangerous. For the league’s predominantly Black players, it has triggered intense harassment, hostile confrontations, and even death threats.
According to The Athletic, players may actively choose to leave or avoid Clark’s team, the Indiana Fever, because of this kind of harmful fan behavior — which actively hurts the game, including Clark’s.
As a white woman, I’ve seen glimpses of this mindset not only from conservative family but from random strangers. For instance, a few months ago, I was waiting at a bus stop, wearing my Seattle Storm jersey and heading to watch a game against the Chicago Sky — Carrington’s team — when a man rolled down his truck window and yelled that he hoped there wouldn’t be any dangerous fouls or funny business. (Uh, go away, sir.) It shows how weirdly pervasive this way of seeing the WNBA has become.
Explore Fox News’ framing by tone, politics, appearance, celebrity, and play more below.
on the web
How Fox News frames each player in headlines
The headlines
| Headline |
|---|
“Rejecting” Identity Politics
While Fox News vociferously rejects “identity politics” in WNBA coverage, they’ve accused outlets like ESPN, USA Today, and The Athletic of being “racial idolaters” and generally injecting left-wing politics about race, gender, and sexuality into their reporting.
Here’s the irony: Fox News talks more about race, gender, and identity in the WNBA than any other outlet. This year they’ve mentioned race or racial politics in 23% of their WNBA articles, and LGBTQ+ topics in 34%, far more than any other outlet.
Does Fox News simply write more opinion-oriented coverage, while the other outlets stick to sports? I don’t think so, at least not entirely.
For one thing, this comparison includes any opinion pieces or off-court coverage from other outlets, and Fox News does cover actual game play. But the amount of editorializing in Fox News’ reporting is telling in its own right. Few, if any, outlets write about the WNBA quite so much through a cultural and political lens.
A closer look reveals the formula behind that framing.
Fox News’ framing increasingly relies on “Us vs. Them”
Fox News’ WNBA playbook wasn’t built overnight. In 2019, the network covered the league like everyone else: which is to say, barely at all. Coverage was sparse, mostly confined to the occasional box score, trade note, or injury update, with a few sporadic pieces on players’ activism or politics, like Natasha Cloud’s.
That shifted during the 2020 COVID bubble season when players turned their activism into tangible political power, mobilizing to help unseat Dream co-owner and GOP Senator Kelly Loeffler. Hostility hardened in 2022, during Griner’s imprisonment in Russia. Fox News commentators and conservative politicians often reinforced one another’s framing of the prisoner swap as a weak concession for an “unpatriotic” athlete.
By the time Clark arrived, their conflict-driven rhetorical blueprint was well-established. They began to weaponize Clark’s stardom into culture-war provocation, framing her as an innocent target under siege by a resentful, “woke” establishment — one that is approximately 70 percent Black, and somewhere between 25 and 35 percent queer, according to a recent Atlantic article by Jemele Hill. They also refined their clickbait scheme, strategically mentioning two or more people in headlines to set up salacious clashes and disagreements.
Explore the web of characters mentioned together in Fox News headlines below.
on the web
Who Fox News names together
Fox News WNBA headlines, per month
Race became a Fox News focus when Clark joined the league
on the web
Share of Fox News articles that mention race vs. six other outlets
Share of articles that mention at least one of the following: racism, racist, white privilege, racial, “Black” or “white” + women/
on television
How Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC split coverage of race in television chyrons
Across mainstream outlets, coverage of race peaked in 2020 during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. That summer, WNBA players led high-profile demonstrations inside the bubble, walking off the court during the national anthem and wearing “Say Her Name” shirts on national television.
But unlike other outlets, Fox News’ coverage of race didn’t fall off after 2020. Instead, it rebounded and was reframed when Clark entered the league in 2024.
Fox News’ most distinctive race-related phrases aren't about civil rights or systemic equity. They are combative culture-war slogans: “race bullies,” “race idolaters,” and even “race war.”
FOX NEWS May 2026
Fox News dramatically accelerated its coverage of LGBTQ+ topics in the last year
on the web
Share of Fox News articles that mention LGBTQ+ topics vs. six other outlets
Share of articles that mention at least one of the following: transgender, trans, gender eligibility, “biological” male/
on television
How Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC split coverage of LGBTQ+ topics in television chyrons
Fox News’ obsessions with race and the LGBTQ+ community, especially transgender women, are intimately connected — a dynamic long unpacked by Black, feminist, and queer scholars through intersectional concepts like “misogynoir” (coined by Moya Bailey) and “transmisogynoir.”
Fox News routinely highlights white players who conform to traditional conventions of femininity — like Cunningham , Kelsey Plum 
, and Cameron Brink 
— while denigrating Black players who do not, advancing an ideal of straight, white, femme womanhood. Drawing these boundaries has only one obvious end: hating women, including trans women.
Cunningham reinforced this framing with anti-trans remarks of her own. While she told ESPN that she “got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans” and clarified that “I never once said that,” she repeated conservative anti-trans talking points about “protect[ing] young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn't have to go against biological men.”
She later doubled down on those comments. And, right-wing politicians and anti-trans advocates worldwide rallied around her, including Vice President J.D. Vance, J.K. Rowling, and Jennifer Sey.
Trans women’s participation in the WNBA has become a non-stop Fox News preoccupation. On television, they spent more than 13 hours discussing the WNBA in summer 2026 alone. It’s worth repeating: no transgender players are currently in the league.
In our analysis of chyrons from Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, Fox News was responsible for 96% of the usage of the word “trans” and 90% for “transgender,” totaling over 200 uses.
As Fox News pundit Jesse Watters recently said on air regarding Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve wearing a “Trans Kids Belong” shirt: “We have to do this again, really? Someone wore a t-shirt at a WNBA game? This isn’t a news story…. We don’t even cover the NBA. Why are we covering the WNBA?”
Fox News particularly focuses on fouls and “protecting” Clark
on the web
Number of Fox News articles that mention hip-check, poke, punch or throat, or protect (per month)
Number of articles that mention at least one of the following: hip-check, poke/
on television
How Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC split coverage of fouls in television chyrons
One particularly powerful right-wing WNBA narrative — which arguably ties both implicit racism and transphobia together — is about fouls.
From the moment Clark entered the league, conservatives have pushed a story that other players are purposely targeting her on the court, often suggesting it’s because she is white. While Clark has faced real physicality — and calls for better officiating were widespread — the narrative of racialized persecution was pure political spin.
By July 2026, that spin reached the halls of Congress. A group of Republican politicians sent a letter to the WNBA commissioner, threatening to call for an “investigation by the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.”
The Republicans cite, as evidence, the fact that “Clark has been hip-checked, poked in the eye, and struck in the throat during games.” It was an almost verbatim echo of Fox News, who spent months repeating those exact words across more than 200 articles fretting about the need to “protect” Clark.
That fixation on “protecting” Clark easily merged with another familiar right-wing narrative. By casting the WNBA as a hostile environment in need of cultural rescue, commentators tapped into the exact same “protect women and children” playbook long weaponized against trans women.
This coverage matters
It’s tempting to dismiss this coverage as drivel. But unfortunately, it matters.
Fox News anchors a media pipeline connecting prolific right-wing blogs and fringe online content farms directly to Republican politicians, including Donald Trump, who fawned over Cunningham’s looks and castigated the league to loud boos at rallies in the lead-up to the 2026 midterms.
Background graphic shows roughly 40 examples of Fox News’ cable coverage of the WNBA. Two videos of Trump talking about the WNBA are pulled out.
As their own host Jesse Watters openly said on air, Fox News doesn’t actually care about women’s basketball. They are exploiting world-class athletes as lucrative ragebait. And it’s working, at least as a business strategy: in August 2026, Fox’s OutKick hit a record 13 million visitors.
Three Fox News clips are pulled out: The Five on a WNBA coach’s “Trans kids belong” T-shirt aimed at Sophie Cunningham, The Big Weekend Show on WNBA Finals ratings amid national anthem drama, and Joe Concha on Cunningham’s post-election message going viral.
The issue isn’t that women’s basketball is being made political — sports are, and have always been, political. The danger is how quickly manufactured panic hardens into policy: Even as the 2026 midterms signaled a broader pushback against anti-trans rhetoric, voters in several states, including my home state of Washington, passed measures restricting transgender students from participating on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
We can’t let the WNBA be weaponized as a Trojan horse for anti-trans politics, or bigotry of any kind. The version of the league peddled by conservative media, the “ragebait W,” is unrecognizable to anyone actually watching the games. So let’s change the channel.
As Roxane Gay argued, the WNBA must match its players’ progressive courage — welcoming trans women while fiercely shielding its athletes from “bad-faith attacks, death threats, harassment, and other racial animus.”
The background switches like a TV changing channels and now shows roughly 40 examples of other outlets’ coverage of the WNBA. Four clips are pulled out: Gabby Williams in an interview, CBS Evening News on the WNBA and players reaching a historic deal, CNN on average WNBA salaries that could rise to over $1 million, and Layshia Clarendon speaking to Andscape.
The W is built different. Inclusivity is in its DNA: from the community in the stands, to beloved non-binary and Black-coded mascots, to the players' relentless push for equity on and off the court. And the basketball is electric.
In this pivotal moment of the league’s growth, we need to see the outrage machine for what it is and push back, lest we all get played.
Background graphic shows roughly 40 examples of other outlets’ coverage of the WNBA. Four game clips are pulled out: the Seattle Storm’s in-arena show with its mascot, a moment from a Storm game, and three-pointers from Gabby Williams and Angel Reese.