Fox News Channel is an American cable news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Since 2002, Fox News has been the highest-rated of America’s three primary cable news networks, ahead of MSNBC and CNN. Its audience size peaked in 2009, though it remains well ahead of its competitors. It earned $534.8 million in profits in 2009, up 19 percent from the previous year, and higher than either CNN or MSNBC.

Fox News has a staff of about 1,200 in about 20 bureaus. It launched the Fox Business Network, a cable news channel, in 2007.

Its best-known personalities include Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Shepard Smith, Mike Huckabee, and Greta Van Susteren.

Fox was founded in 1996 by Roger Ailes (who remains its head) and Rupert Murdoch as an antidote to what they saw as the mainstream media’s ideological and political bias.

Over the past decade, Fox has increasingly moved into opinion and analysis, in addition to news and original reporting. Fox is generally understood to have a conservative political outlook, something that has brought it both praise and criticism, the latter including accusations of being a mouthpiece of the Republican Party, as well as accusations of poor journalism. It has hired numerous current politicians as news analysts.