We Watched 24 Straight Hours of Fox News on “Stormy Daniels Day.” Oof.

This is part of Sly as Fox, a short series about the perils of underestimating Fox News in 2024. 

In the wake of historic lawsuits, Rupert Murdoch’s exit, Tucker Carlson’s firing, and more, it might seem like Fox News is in retreat.  It isn’t—and the people who are likely to decide the next election tend to watch the network. Below, a 24-hour diary of what they’re hearing on a typical day: in this case, May 9, the day Stormy Daniels was cross-examined in Donald Trump’s trial.

5:27 a.m. “Stormy Daniels will be back on the witness stand today, where she is reportedly expected to face a longer cross-examination” is Fox & Friends First co-host Todd Piro’s lead-in to the story of the day. After establishing the topic, Piro transitions to an interview segment with Gene Hamilton, the vice president of America First Legal, a Stephen Miller–fronted group intent on opposing “the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police, and anti-American crusade.”

“Gene, as to this longer cross-examination—makes sense to me. A longer cross gives Stormy Daniels more time to self-destruct on the stand,” says Piro, a former lawyer. “Bad for the prosecution, great for the defense. Your thoughts?”

“You’re absolutely right, Todd,” says Hamilton. “That is exactly the purpose of an effective cross-examination. You have to undermine the witness’s credibility and show to the jury that what she is saying might in fact not be true.” An informative observation! Alas, I cannot tell you much more about the substance of this segment, because I got distracted by an unfortunately placed lighting fixture in Hamilton’s background, which made it look like there were antennae sprouting from his head.

5:42 a.m. Piro’s co-host Carley Shimkus is joined by Republican Rep. Joe “You Lie!” Wilson, best known for interrupting a 2009 Barack Obama speech with the aforementioned blurt, and I cannot help thinking that this is a man who missed his moment. If the South Carolinian had timed his outburst to coincide with the peak conservative wingnut era, “You Lie!” would’ve been on T-shirts, and he would’ve immediately become a right-wing social media icon. Instead, he’s stuck doing live hits before sunrise with the Fox News C-team. So what is Wilson outraged about this morning? Joe Biden’s immigration policies, of course. “What they’re proposing, really, is a fraud,” says Wilson, and it doesn’t really have the same ring to it as his first catchphrase. I guess some people peak early!

6 a.m. “Good mornin’, everybody! It is 6 a.m. here in New York City. Also, we have 60 degrees. It’s beautiful outside!” sings Steve Doocy as Fox & Friends First throws to Fox & Friends, the network’s long-running three-hour-long morning chat extravaganza.

“It’s gonna be nice,” says Ainsley Earhardt.

“It is! We’re gonna go outside and see some dogs in a little while, but, in the meantime, welcome aboard,” says Doocy, as Earhardt chuckled and a stone-faced Brian Kilmeade stares directly into the camera, nodding grimly. Dogs, weather, and barely suppressed rage—that’s the Fox & Friends formula!

6:05 a.m. Sen. Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, is in studio with the Fox & Friends crew for an animated discussion that touches on several newsy topics, including the Israel-Gaza war. (Doocy: “So whose side is Joe Biden on?” Scott: “Well, he’s clearly on Hamas’ side.”) Scott is in New York to attend Trump’s trial, and the segment eventually works its way over to that story. “This is just political persecution. It’s a crime to use the courts for political persecution,” Scott says. “And, by the way, I saw this. It happened to me. I fought HillaryCare, and guess what happened when I fought HillaryCare? [The Department of] Justice came after me and attacked me and my company.” The incident to which the senator was referring happened decades ago, when Scott was CEO of America’s largest for-profit hospital chain, which under his leadership came under FBI investigation for Medicare fraud; Scott was ousted as CEO, and the company eventually paid a then-record $1.7 billion fine. “If we don’t stop this, they can go after you. Every American’s at risk,” Scott continues, and it probably seems like a very good point to all of the corporate health care profiteers who tuned in to watch their buddy on TV.

6:27 a.m. “There’s a huge spike in Chinese migrants,” says Doocy, as an on-screen graphic sourced to U.S. Customs and Border Protection announces that 1,026 Chinese nationals were apprehended the previous week for “illegally entering the United States.” He is soon joined by former acting ICE Director Tom Homan, a burly man with a perpetual scowl who supervised and has since vociferously defended the Trump administration’s family separation policy. Homan has since become a Fox News contributor, and we will be seeing a lot of him this year as the network attempts to persuade viewers that the Biden administration’s migrant policies have made the country dangerously unsafe. Homan has plenty to say on that topic. Unfortunately for Fox, much of what Homan has to say is hard to understand, because he mumbles.

7:07 a.m. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, fresh off of successfully thwarting Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s misbegotten motion to vacate the speakership, joins the gang live from the Capitol rotunda. In the background of the shot, you can see a separate camera and lighting setup awaiting a guest, presumably belonging to a different network. I like to imagine Johnson concluding his Fox hit and then running halfway around the rotunda to immediately hop on with some other show. Now that’s what I call a victory lap.

7:27 a.m. Earhardt convenes a segment about the “vicious anti-Israel protesters” at Columbia University, as part of the network’s ongoing efforts to portray them as entitled children and their actions as violent and unruly. To that end, she plays a clip of a Free Press interview with one of the Hamilton Hall custodians who was on duty when protesters briefly occupied the building, and then sits down with John Samuelsen, president of the Transport Workers Union of America, who earlier that week had announced his intent to sue Columbia on behalf of the workers negatively affected by the building takeover. (Those workers are members of the TWU.)

“What was your reaction when you knew that your guys were stuck in that building?” Earhardt asks.

“Well, we were appalled,” says Samuelsen, who speaks with a thick Brooklyn accent and flaunts an untucked shirt. Don’t be fooled by surface impressions, though: Samuelsen, who previously led the NYC public transit union, is a smart operator who knows exactly what Earhardt is up to. “Just to be clear, it wasn’t every protester, and not every protester at Columbia has been hostile to our workforce. We’re particularly incensed at Columbia for not protecting the workers, and particularly pissed at those particular protesters that tried to hold our workers in the building,” Samuelsen says. I, for one, would subscribe to an organized labor-themed podcast called John Samuelsen Is Pissed.

7:34 a.m. A poorly lit Mike Huckabee appears in an ad for something called “The Kids Guide to the Presidential Election.” Presidential elections are something that Huckabee understands very well, having failed to make it out of the primaries in two of them. “As the candidates race toward the White House, America hopes for a clean and fair election. But do your kids understand what that means?” he asks. Judging by the excerpts shown in the ad, it is not at all clear whether Mike Huckabee’s pamphlet is capable of enlightening them. (“Did you know? …  that a Lame Duck is not a poor duck with a broken leg? Find out what it is on Page 16.”)

8:01 a.m. At the top of the third and final hour of Fox & Friends, the gang teases some of the material they’ll cover in the remainder of the show. “Can the way you text give your age away?” Kilmeade reads, as a TikTok video of someone texting with both thumbs takes up the screen. “Hmm!”

“Definitely,” Earhardt interjects.

“One TikTok user claims each generation has a different way of communicating,” Kilmeade finishes, and as the camera cuts back to the hosts on the studio couch, Steve Doocy, apparently on his ninth cup of coffee, is all but bouncing up and down in anticipation.

“Oh, that’s a good tease! I wanna know the answer,” Doocy says.

“Right, but I don’t want TikTok. TikTok evil,” says Kilmeade. “The final hour of Fox & Friends starts right now, and you know the deal. You know the deal!”

“Mornings are better with friends!!!” Doocy exclaims.

8:24 a.m. After laughing their way through the generational texting story and announcing that Kilmeade is the worst texter of all the Fox & Friends crew—it was a legitimately fun segment—the gang gets back on topic and throws to their man on the street at the Donald Trump trial. “Well, it will be stormy for Stormy when she returns to the stand this morning—as you said, in just about an hour from now—after, man oh man, what we heard here from the stand on Tuesday,” says correspondent Eric Shawn, whom you also might remember from his cameo appearance as “TV Reporter #2” in Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Shawn’s cheesy introductory wordplay is the highlight of his segment, which the hosts speed through quickly, presumably to deprive Shawn of the chance to say the line again.

8:27 a.m. “Last time Stormy was on the stand, in the morning, when the prosecution was interviewing her, the testimony was good for the prosecution. Then, on cross-examination, things kinda fell apart,” says Doocy, in prelude to an in-studio segment with attorney Rebecca Rose Woodland, who has appeared on many different TV networks as a legal analyst.

“Yes, they did, they fell apart, because what’s happening here is the judge is allowing a ridiculously wide scope of factual information to come in that has nothing to do with this case,” Woodland says. “This is a records case on bookkeeping.”

“Yes!” breathes Earhardt, from off camera. As the segment goes on, it becomes clear that Woodland still has gum in her mouth.

8:55 a.m. Almost three hours after they were first invoked, Doocy, Earhardt, and Kilmeade finally make it outside to see those damn dogs.

9:19 a.m. We’re into America’s Newsroom, anchored by Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino, both of whom made my December 2021 Slate ranking of the 10 least despicable people left at Fox News in the wake of Chris Wallace’s then-recent departure. While Hemmer and Perino won’t go out of their way to avoid or rebut Fox’s daily storylines, their show is more distinctly journalistic than the two programs that precede it each day. What does that mean in practice? Basically, instead of sitting on a couch, they sit behind a big curved desk with a graphic on the front that says America’s Newsroom.

At 9:19 a “Fox News Alert” is sounded, and Perino throws it to a live feed of Donald Trump walking into the courthouse and reading a brief statement to the press. As he approaches the cameras, I spy the gaunt Rick Scott looming sepulchrally in the background, presumably waiting for somebody to notice him so that he can launch into his HillaryCare spiel again.

9:24 a.m. Hemmer and Perino, alongside former MTV VJ and current Fox commentator Kennedy and former NYPD inspector Paul Mauro, take a few minutes to poke fun at Michael Cohen’s TikTok account. “Cohen’s TikTok last night was incredible,” Mauro says. “He’s wearing a T-shirt of Donald Trump behind bars in cuffs, and he’s begging his followers to get to a million followers, and he’s begging for subscribers.” Honestly, Mauro’s bemused recitation of Cohen’s TikTok performance doesn’t seem all that different from the sort of thing I might send to my editor in prelude to pitching a blog post on the topic. In this moment—even if only in this moment—America’s Newsroom really does seem like a newsroom.

10:06 a.m. As Stormy Daniels resumes her testimony—the judge has barred cameras from the courtroom, which means there is no live footage for cable news to air—Hemmer brings in former U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman, who sets up what we can expect from the morning’s cross-examination. “Now, what you’re gonna see now is the defense team is going to adapt a strategy that is very common on cross-examination, and that is the strategy to get the witness unsettled, get them defensive, and then go in for the kill on some of the more important details of the transaction that’s at hand,” Tolman predicts. It’s basically the same point that Gene Hamilton was making almost five hours earlier, with one critical difference: Tolman, who is appearing in front of a mountainous backdrop, does not appear to have little antennae growing out of his head. Sucks for him!

—Justin Peters

11 a.m.: We kick off The Faulkner Focus with a lovely rant from host Harris Faulkner, who marks “Day 2 of the nasty storytelling sex film worker.” We even get a little word from Ted Cruz, who sputters about how “no one believes Donald Trump has been celibate all his life.”

11:06 a.m.: Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who reportedly arrived at the courthouse alongside Trump, is once again ranting to the press about how the justice system went after “my company” and is now targeting Trump. “I’m proud of him for standing up for all of us,” Scott says. “Because if they can go after him, they can go after any of you.”

11:08 a.m.: We go from Scott’s empty lectern to a Faulkner Focus panel, featuring legal analyst Jonna Spilbor, Fox Business commentator and ex-congressman Sean Duffy, and former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, whose wife is a devoted Slate reader. Duffy starts by raging against “woke-ified law schools” and the supposedly woke-ified graduates going on to staff a woke-ified justice system. Spilbor jumps off Scott’s point about Democratic Party–connected prosecutors to hint that “there might be some ramifications for Judge Juan Merchan when this case is over, and remember I said that,” earning a loud and affirmative “mmm!” from Faulkner.

11:18 a.m.: We’ve got an ad here with Mike Huckabee on guitar.

11:37 a.m.: Faulkner cycles through a couple clips from MSNBC’s Morning Joe and CNN’s Inside Politics where commentators appear to cast doubt on the effectiveness of Stormy Daniels’ testimony, especially when it came to the more explicit sexual tales. “The liberal networks [are] now pointing out this is damaging for the prosecution,” says Faulkner, as her producers then visually showcase a Wall Street Journal editorial board op-ed about “The Stormy Daniels Sex Trial” and a Washington Examiner op-ed about “The Trump Trial Farce.” While she reads out from a segment from the latter piece, she makes sure to shout out the Journal by name but not the Examiner. Ouch!

11:50 a.m.: Former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen joins to make a solemn point: Totaling up his state and federal trials, Trump is facing 91 distinct charges. But Charles Manson only faced 10! Isn’t that weird?

11:53 a.m.: New rage bait just dropped: A photo of Daniels and her attorney, Clark Brewster, taken from inside the witness room and posted on X, formerly Twitter. “That picture is absolutely ridiculous,” seethes Spilbor. “Now they are taking photo-ops at a sham trial of a former president and likely future president. Look how happy they are!” The legal analyst then bets Daniels will attempt to “profit” from the photo.

12:11 p.m.: Not even 20 minutes after Fox viewers were introduced to the photo of Daniels and her attorney, we’re already back at its foul nature and moneymaking potential. “This is a grift!” yells Faulkner. “This is not selfie-taking time!”

12:40 p.m.: Legal commentator Mark Eiglarsh joins by video to yell/chat with Faulkner about how he’s “holding back disdain for this prosecution until I hear it rest, but this TRIAL has JUMPED the SHARK OFFICIALLY.” He doesn’t appear to be holding back.

1 p.m.: We’re now ready for a two-hour broadcast of America Reports, co-anchored by John Roberts and Fox’s White House correspondent, Jacqui Heinrich, who’s filling in for Sandra Smith.

1:05 p.m.: Beloved Fox fixture Judge Jeanine Pirro is here, having gone to check out Thursday’s trial proceedings for herself. Now, if Trump’s lawyer Susan Necheles’ cross-examination of Daniels was—as my colleague Susan Matthews characterized it—“astonishingly simplistic and, frankly, petty,” full of sexist questions that “tried to drag Daniels as both a slut and a money-grubber,” that’s not how Pirro saw it. Instead, the host lavished praise upon Necheles for giving a “master class in cross-examination” and making Daniels come off as hateful and “kooky.”

1:12 p.m.: Oops, we lost Pirro right as Roberts, Heinrich, and Pirro were about to tear into something Jen Psaki said on MSNBC. So we have Townhall.com editor Katie Pavlich helping kill the time until they figure out the technical difficulties.

1:22 p.m.: Well, perhaps we won’t figure out those technical difficulties, because we’ve already moved on to correspondent Lydia Hu, standing outside the courtroom and offering a preview of the forthcoming testimony from former Trump Organization bookkeeper Madeleine Westerhout.

2 p.m.: Upon the second hour of America Reports, we must ask: Will America ever stop reporting?

2:10 p.m.: Washington Times opinion editor Charlie Hurt has been on for a few minutes to rant about the “fundamentally unserious trial” of Donald Trump, and we go to a clip of the defendant’s morning remarks, in which he quotes from—whaddaya know!—an April 16 America Reports segment where legal commentator Jonathan Turley described the lawsuit as a “Frankenstein case.” John Roberts makes a riff referencing Young Frankenstein, which causes Hurt to guffaw and rave about “one of Trump’s greatest gifts,” which is “to take what’s obvious to everyone and boil it down into very vivid and colorful language.”

2:12 p.m.: We’ve got an ad about how the Federal Reserve is printing too much money, so it’s time to stock up on gold.

2:27 p.m.: Mark Eiglarsh returns, this time alongside legal analyst Mercedes Colwin. Eiglarsh once against screeches about the “salacious” details from Daniels’ testimony, Colwin kiddingly “thanks” him for “getting that image in my head,” and John Roberts wonders if the poor jury will be able to “unsee” any of this.

2:44 p.m.: Fox & Friends’ Brian Kilmeade is here! With … more of the same regarding every aforementioned topic, although he gives a little sneak preview of his forthcoming One Nation broadcast, where West Virginia’s own Joe Manchin will have “lots to say about his own party.” You don’t say.

2:53 p.m.: Jonathan Turley re-rereturns to paint a picture of how the vibes in the courtroom went from “a Sex Pistols concert to Gregorian chants” with the witness transition from Daniels to Westerhout.

3 p.m.: It’s time for The Story With Martha MacCallum, although to take it from the opening monologue, it doesn’t appear this story will be much different from what we’ve been hearing throughout the day: BAD Stormy Daniels.

3:14 p.m.: Judge Jeanine is back, comparing her courtroom experience Thursday to watching The Sixth Sense.

3:28 p.m.: Another former Trump lawyer yells a lot.

3:40 p.m.: A real cursed blunt rotation here as Ari Fleischer, ex-Rep. Jason Chaffetz, and former Obama White House adviser Robert Wolf join to discuss a Quinnipiac poll that shows Biden ahead of Trump in Wisconsin. Wolf touts the strength of the Biden record without “all of this nonsense from the courts”; Fleischer makes the point that the polls will be close until November; and Chaffetz mocks Biden as someone who can “barely communicate.”

4 p.m.: Whose world is this? It’s Your World With Neil Cavuto. We begin with Fox News correspondent Nate Foy recapping his time in the courthouse, when Madeleine Westerhout became “emotional” on the stand describing Donald and Melania’s relationship.

4:30 p.m.: John “Torture Memos” Yoo is on to rip the case against Trump, to denigrate Daniels’ credibility, and offer kind words to Madeleine Westerhout, because she happily recalls her time working with Trump. More of the same, folks.

—Nitish Pahwa

5 p.m.: We launch into The Five, which has five co-hosts and begins at 5 p.m. Eastern time. A fun idea there, all the 5’s. Host Dana Perino notes that Daniels appeared on a supernatural investigations show in which she discovered that what she thought was a ghost in her house was actually a possum.

5:06 p.m. Jeanine Pirro—Judge Jeanine—says that Daniels’ credibility suffers because she said she wouldn’t tell the story of her alleged affair to Slate.com unless she was paid for it. Hey, that’s us! I would’ve paid her, personally.

5:11 p.m. All five co-hosts—even Richard Fowler, the day’s liberal—turn out to agree that Daniels’ testimony was not helpful to the prosecution’s case.

5:18 p.m. Greg Gutfeld pronounces Holocaust as, like, Hole-o-caust. Never heard that one.

5:25 p.m. Fowler pushes back on Pirro’s claims about the moral righteousness of Israel’s war in Gaza, pointing out that none of the children who’ve died in bombardments chose to be led by Hamas, which leads to Jesse Watters making a relatively sophisticated/fair point about Biden wanting to avoid the PR blowback of a Rafah invasion despite having essentially sponsored Israel’s war up to this point. A commercial for MyPillow follows.

5:45 p.m. Gutfeld pronounces fentanyl as fenta-nol.

6:31 p.m. Turley again—busy day! He appears on Bret Baier’s news show to discuss antiwar protests at George Washington University. Turley says the protests have prevented him from being able to drive to his office.

7:01 p.m. Laura Ingraham calls Alvin Bragg “pudgy” and says Daniels is an “angry shrew,” then plays videos of other cable networks’ analysts reacting to Daniels’ testimony. To emphasize: The subject of her opening segment is MSNBC and CNN panel reactions.

7:22 p.m. It’s harrowing how silent the studio of a single-host show can sound when they’re delivering a line that isn’t landing. It feels, right now at 7:22 p.m., like Laura Ingraham, during her segment about how disgusted she purportedly is about how insensitive Joe Biden’s comments about grocery prices were during an interview he did with CNN, is the only person on Earth.

7:51 p.m. A commercial for “NeuroQ” pills says their formula relies on the work of “brain scientists” and “brain doctors.”

7:59 p.m. Ingraham’s show concludes with commentary on a clip from MSNBC.

8:04 p.m. Jesse Watters’ show starts with two clips of people talking on CNN—and not even people whose analysis he disagrees with; they were being critical of Biden. It’s just there as, like, exposition. He does this again a few minutes later with Anderson Cooper laughing about the Stormy Daniels/possum thing.

8:51 p.m. Credit where it’s due: It was a good idea to ask people attending a furry convention in New Jersey whether they’ve noticed that the price of fur suits has gone up in Biden’s economy. (Some of them said yes.)

9:04 p.m. First segment of Sean Hannity’s show? You know it’s Anderson Cooper talking about the possum thing!

9:25 p.m. Holy crap, that’s what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sounds like now? Wow. (Segment about Kennedy’s appearance on a podcast in which he said abortion should be legal at any time during pregnancy, part of the wave of right-wing attacks on Kennedy that have followed a wave of anxiety about his potential to draw votes away from Trump. Hannity assures his guests that “we” have “179 days left” to spread awareness of Kennedy’s positions.)

9:41 p.m. Guest Mark Levin concludes a segment about Biden holding back a shipment of weapons to Israel by shouting—literally screaming and shouting—for three-and-a-half uninterrupted minutes. (The premise is that he’s talking “to” Biden—“how dare you, sir,” etc. This happens a lot on Fox prime time.) Levin describes Biden’s comments about ”indiscriminate” Israeli bombing as “blood libel” against Jews and says that Biden “funded Oct. 7.” (It’s a convoluted accusation involving Iran.) For the last 78 seconds of his segment Levin is shouting over the music that signals that it’s time to go to commercial, like what happens when acceptance speeches go on too long at the Oscars.

10:04 p.m. Greg Gutfeld’s show opens with an actual late-night comedy monologue. One of his topics is about the dating app Bumble—whose gimmick was that only women were allowed to make initial contact with other users—changing its rules to allow men to make the first move. “It turns out putting women in the driver’s seat for dating was as bad of an idea as putting them in the driver’s seat for driving,” he says. I laughed. Some of the other jokes were problematic, though.

10:43 p.m. Gutfeld’s panelists are not impressed by a bill introduced by Republican Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles that would send any college student convicted of unlawful activity to Gaza for “six months of community service.” One calls it “virtue signaling.”

10:57 p.m. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee appears in a commercial promoting a sleep drug called “Relaxium.” The next advertisement is for something called “Super Beta Prostate.”

—Ben Mathis-Lilley