Mark Levin, a star of conservative talk radio who joined Fox in November 2017, has taken a markedly different tact. The host of a weekly show, Levin singularly lobs insults at his colleagues — mostly Fox’s news reporters and anchors, but also recently a fellow opinion host — in a manner that has created negative headlines and headaches in the process.
“It definitely goes against one of the core Fox philosophies,” said a Fox News veteran who requested anonymity to speak candidly.
Levin’s willingness to dump on his own colleagues has burnished his reputation as a sort of rogue independent who balks at the governing rules of the corporate media ecosystem — and a wild card who could end up playing a big role in the future of the conservative movement.
“You see, this isn’t a game to me,” Levin said on his radio show last Thursday. “I’m not positioning myself. This is deadly serious. The real world matters here."
Levin was explaining his willingness to indirectly criticize his colleague Fox host Tucker Carlson after New York Times media columnist Ben Smith revealed that Carlson has been a key source for journalists who write about his company and about the Trump administration.
That didn’t sit well with Levin, who prides himself on rebuffing media reporters who approach him for comment. "I’ve been in this business almost 20 years,” Levin said. “I worked in the Reagan administration for eight years. I never once — not once — leaked anything to a newspaper or media outlet, ever. Let alone the New York Times and their ilk. Certainly not about the people around me. I could go further into this — I’m not going to.” (Levin did not respond to an emailed request for an interview for this story.)
Doing what Carlson was reported to have done is “a serious misunderstanding of one’s role, of loyalty, and character,” Levin said.
While strikingly unusual for a Fox host, it was nothing new for Levin. “He was always the anti-establishment guy,” said Brian Rosenwald, a media historian and expert on political talk radio. “That’s his brand: that this is serious stuff, the nation is imperiled, and I will call out anyone, Democrat or Republican, that I need to call out and beat them over the head.”
However, he’s unlikely to call out Fox colleague Sean Hannity, who refers to Levin reverently as “the great one.”
Levin is not one of Fox’s weekday opinion stars, so “he gets a little bit more leeway in terms of what he does outside of the Fox world,” said Michael Harrison, editor and publisher of Talkers, a magazine covering the talk radio industry.
“Because he has such a large radio following and a very loyal one at that, he’s valuable to Fox because he brings a large radio audience to Fox," he said. "Fox has always been aware of the traffic that they can generate by putting successful talk radio hosts on television who bring their audience to the Fox television channel, as opposed to vice versa.”
Since he joined the network, Levin’s fire has mostly been trained on members of Fox’s news division, most frequently anchor Chris Wallace. (Fox News representatives did not respond to a request for comment on Levin’s criticisms.)
On Jan. 6, in the hours after a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, Levin accused Wallace — and other mainstream journalists — of placing blame unfairly on Trump supporters.
“It’s not okay to do this,” he said of the insurrection. “But when you have Chris Wallace on TV talking about ‘the mob,’ so, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people — he’s sitting in his studio, he’s not even there — are now responsible for this, it is outrageous. . . . The endless effort to exploit events is what infuriates law-abiding, peaceful Americans like you and me who are fed up with it."
On Sept. 30, Levin gave Wallace an extremely low grade as moderator of the previous night’s general election debate between Joe Biden and then-President Donald Trump, which he said was “moderated awfully.” Once again, he framed his criticism as truth-telling.
"I was deeply offended by some of the questions that were asked by the moderator,” Levin said. “I’m an American first. Not a radio host first. Not a TV host first. And I’m going to tell it like it is.”
After Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin confirmed the Atlantic’s bombshell reporting about Trump insulting service veterans, Levin called her reporting “meaningless” because it relied on anonymous sources. (Most of Griffin’s colleagues, however, rallied around her after Trump responded to her report by lashing out at her on Twitter.)
In a September 2019 appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Levin bristled when Ed Henry, then a Fox News host and national correspondent, pressed him on whether he thought it was appropriate for the president to lean on Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens. “Your question is not honest,” Levin snapped. (Levin later issued a statement saying that he likes Henry.) A few months later, he groused on Twitter that fellow conservative pundits, including those on Fox News, were borrowing a theory of his regarding Trump’s international intervention strategy, “without attribution of course.”
He has also clashed with Fox’s corporate echelons. In November 2019, Levin exploded on his radio show when confronted with the assertion that he had violated Fox’s prohibition on “talent participating in campaign events” by campaigning for a Republican candidate for state Senate in Virginia.
“If I want to support a friend who’s running for the state Senate, well, damn it, I will do it,” he told his listeners. “I should have done more for him. If I want to support my local sheriff, then damn it, I will do it. And nobody on this planet is going to stop me. No corporation.”
While it has been lost to the cable news memory hole, Levin was actually a vociferous and vicious critic of Fox News — and the ruling Murdoch family — before he joined the network in 2017. He has referred to Lachlan Murdoch, now the CEO of Fox News parent company Fox Corp., and his brother, former company executive James Murdoch, as “the liberal Murdoch kids.” In May 2017, he asked whether “Fox is about to implode?”
Levin, who had supported Ted Cruz for president before rallying behind Trump and becoming one of the biggest television cheerleaders for his presidency, lashed out at Fox for giving Trump a platform to spread a disproven conspiracy theory trying to tie Cruz’s father to assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
“What a disgrace that pathetic network has become!” Levin said in May 2016. “They’re worse than CNN, and at least MSNBC tells you what they are. But that Fox News network is going to take down this country. They think they’re all-powerful, Rupert Murdoch and all the rest of them. I am deadly serious about this. What they’re doing to the Republican Party, the conservative movement in this country, is a damnable disgrace. ‘They report, we decide?’ ‘Fair and balanced?’ Baloney!”
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