Rupert Murdoch established Fox News to fill what he saw as a niche in the market for news that, according to Murdoch, was "fair and balanced". In the opinion of Ken Auletta of The New Yorker, it was to counter a news media that Murdoch believed was predominantly liberal. A 2004 survey of journalists by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that Fox was "the single news outlet that strikes most journalists as taking a particular ideological stance", with 56% of National journalists citing Fox News as being especially conservative in its coverage of news•. Further research has shown that there is a correlation between the presence of the Fox News Channel in cable markets and increases in Republican votes in those markets.• Fox News has consistently denied any bias in their news reporting.
News Corp had gained significant experience of rolling news when its BSkyB subsidiary started Europe's first 24 hour news channel, Sky News, in the United Kingdom back in 1989.

In February 1996, after Roger Ailes was relieved of duties at America's Talking, in preparation for conversion of the network to MSNBC, Murdoch called Ailes to start the Fox News Channel. A group of Ailes loyalists who followed him throughout the NBC empire joined him at Fox. From there, the CNBC expatriates, who joined a team already in place at Fox News, created the programming concept and proceeded to select space in New York. Ailes worked individuals through five months of grueling 14-hour workdays and several weeks of rehearsal shows before launch, on October 6, 1996.

At launch, only ten million households were able to watch Fox News, with none in the major media markets of New York City and Los Angeles. According to published reports, many media reviewers had to watch the first day's programming at Fox News studios because it was not readily available. The rolling news coverage during the day consisted of 20-minute single topic shows like Fox on Crime or Fox on Politics surrounded by news headlines. Interviews had various interesting facts at the bottom of the screen about the topic or the guest. The flagship newscast at the time was called The Schneider Report, with Mike Schneider giving a fast paced delivery of the news. During the evening, Fox had opinion shows: The O'Reilly Factor (then called The O'Reilly Report), The Crier Report hosted by Catherine Crier, and Hannity & Colmes. From the beginning, FNC has also had a number of different slogans it included in daily broadcasts including: "America's Newsroom," "The Most Powerful Name in News," "Fox Means Business," "Fair and Balanced," "Fox is Where The News Is," "We Report, You Decide," and most recently, "We Put the World in Context."

From the beginning, Fox News has had a heavy emphasis on the visual presentation of news. Graphics were designed to be colorful and attention grabbing, and to allow people to get the main points of what was being said even if they couldn't hear the host, through the use of on-screen text summarizing the position of the interviewer or speaker, and "bullet points" when a host was giving commentary.

Fox News also created the "Fox News Alert," which interrupted regular programming when a breaking news story occurred. Each News Alert was designed to be attention-catching with a swooshing graphic filling the screen and a piercing chime instead of the regular news music. At the beginning of FNC, the Fox News Alert was used fairly rarely, giving the chime more cachet, but currently it is used regularly to announce scheduled events or repeat existing news instead of only breaking news stories, with Fox News Alerts sometimes several times each hour instead of just a few times a day. The network has also created modified versions of this alert, including a "Mideast Alert" and "Business Alert," to create a more subject-specific oriented alert. In fact, Your World with Neil Cavuto begins almost all of its broadcasts with a Fox News Alert, usually on the stock market changes of the day.

Fox News was also the first network to put up the American flag after the September 11, 2001 attacks, a feature in the upper left-hand corner that has persisted to this day.

To accelerate its adoption by cable companies, Fox News paid systems up to $11 per subscriber to distribute the network. This contrasted with the normal practice, in which cable operators paid stations carriage fees for the programming of channels. When Time Warner bought out Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting, a federal antitrust consent decree required Time Warner to carry a second all-news channel in addition to Time Warner's own CNN. Time Warner selected MSNBC as the secondary news network, instead of Fox News. Fox News claimed that this violated an agreement to carry Fox News, and Ailes used his connections to persuade Mayor Giuliani to carry Fox News and Bloomberg Television on two underutilized city-owned cable channels, which he did.

New York City also threatened to revoke Time Warner's cable franchise for not carrying Fox News.

A lawsuit was filed by Time Warner against the City of New York claiming undue interference and for inappropriate use of the city's educational channels for commercial programming. News Corporation countered with an antitrust lawsuit against Time Warner for unfairly protecting CNN. This led to an acrimonious battle between Murdoch and Turner, with Turner publicly comparing Murdoch to Adolf Hitler while Murdoch's New York Post ran an editorial questioning Turner's sanity. Giuliani's motives were also questioned, as his then-wife was a producer at Murdoch-owned WNYW-TV. In the end, Time Warner and News Corporation signed a settlement agreement to permit Fox News to be carried on New York City cable system beginning in October 1997, and to all of Time Warner's cable systems by 2001, though Time Warner still does not carry Fox News in all areas.• In return, Time Warner was given some rights to News Corporation's satellites in Asia and Europe to distribute Time Warner programming, would receive the normal compensation per subscriber paid to cable operators, and News Corporation would not object to Atlanta Braves baseball games being carried on TBS (which normally would not happen because of the Fox television network's contract with Major League Baseball).

Fox News also produced several newsmagazine shows for its Fox affiliates including Fox Files and The Pulse, although both were cancelled after short runs due to poor ratings.

Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace currently airs on many Fox affiliates and is similar in format to other Sunday morning political discussion programs. Fox Network also produces certain live events for the Fox (such as the State of the Union), and national news segments to air on the local Fox affiliate's news programs.

Fox News and the Fox broadcast network is thought by news insiders to be using its new syndicated newsmagazine Geraldo at Large (which airs in prime slots on all of Fox's owned and operated stations) as a test run of rolling out a national newscast. Fox News chairman Roger Ailes is now also chairman of the Fox Television Stations division, and has been pushing for the network's O&Os to have a more uniform image and presentation in their newscasts.

In January of 2007, a yet unnamed morning show hosted by Fox News Channel's Juliet Huddy and Mike Jerrick (hosts of Dayside, formerly of Fox & Friends Weekend) will debut on all Fox-owned and -operated stations *.

The originally announced plans for Fox's soon to be launched sister network, MyNetworkTV (which is also under Roger Ailes's control), included a Fox News-produced program, On Scene, which would have focused on crime-related stories. However, the network has subsequently decided to not air any non-telenovela programming. *

Fox News also boasts a website with a number of political columnists and weblogs. Fox News entertainment correspondent Mike Straka and Italian-American priest Jonathan Morris maintain their own weekly blogs. The following is an incomplete list of personalities that may appear regularly on Foxnews.com:

Cato Institute writer - Ted Galen Carpenter, libertarian columnist, fierce critic of socialism and protectionism.

Cato Institute writer - Michael Tanner staunch advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, opponent of universal health care.

Heritage Foundation writer - James Jay Carafano, paleoconservative opponent of the separation between church and state, abortion and stem cell research.

Heritage Foundation writer - David Muhlhausen, conservative opponent of public school and the separation between church and state

Individualist feminist writer - Wendy McElroy, individualist anarchist/feminist and critic of liberal feminism, espouses a libertarian alternative.

Tongue-Tied blog-writer - Scott Norvell, anti-political correctness columnist and humorist.

Junk Science writer - Steven Milloy, outspoken opponent of environmentalism and global warming.

Center for Security Policy - Olivia Albrecht, neoconservative columnist.

Libertarian writer - Radley Balko, advocate of globalization, pro-life opponent of Roe v. Wade and supporter of federalism.

Real Clear Politics writer - Jed Babbin conservative pundit

Real Clear Politics neoconservative writer - Robert Tracinski

Real Clear Politics pundit - Peter Brown, conservative columnist

Real Clear Politics pundit - John McIntyre, conservative columnist

Real Clear Politics pundit - Tom Bevan, conservative columnist

Neoliberal writer - Martin Frost, former Texas conservative Democrat representative, defeated in the United States House election, 2004.

Blue Streak writer - Susan Estrich, feminist advocate, liberal commentator