Something remarkable just happened in the digital news business. For the first time since the Media Research Center launched our Digital News Tracker in November 2025, FoxNews.com has overtaken CNN.com in monthly U.S. web traffic.
According to Press Gazette’s latest ranking of the 50 largest news websites in America, Fox News drew 222.1 million U.S. visits in July, compared with CNN’s 220.5 million. The margin is small, but the significance is not, especially when you consider something else that happened in November 2025.
CNN disappeared from Apple News.
CNN and Apple ended their distribution agreement after the two companies failed to reach a new deal. Whatever the business considerations behind the decision, the practical effect was simple: CNN lost access to one of the most powerful distribution pipelines in digital news. Nine months later, FoxNews.com has passed CNN.com in U.S. web traffic.
Correlation is not causation, and CNN certainly has plenty of problems that Apple did not create. But the timing deserves attention because it provides a fascinating real-world test of something MRC has been arguing: distribution matters.
We have seen a version of this story before.
When Fox News launched in 1996, CNN was the undisputed king of cable news. CNN had the brand, the audience and a 16-year head start. Fox had to fight simply to get carried, with some cable systems initially refusing to distribute the network at all.
Then Americans got a choice.
By January 2002, Fox News had overtaken CNN in the cable news ratings. It never looked back.
The battle over media distribution did not disappear with the decline of cable television. It moved. Today, Apple News, Google News, MSN and Yahoo News serve as enormously powerful gateways between news organizations and their potential audiences. Millions of Americans no longer seek out news by going directly to a news organization. They open an app, look at a notification or scroll through a feed assembled for them.
MRC’s research has repeatedly shown that conservative outlets do not receive anything resembling equal treatment from the major news aggregators. Apple News has been among the most striking examples. Fox News certainly is not being propped up by Apple. Our tracking shows Apple distributes very little Fox News content compared with the enormous volume it features from liberal and establishment news organizations.
That is what makes the new numbers so interesting. Fox did not overtake CNN because Apple suddenly started helping Fox. CNN lost the advantage of Apple distribution, while Fox continued competing largely without it.
And Fox won.
CNN’s decline obviously cannot be attributed entirely to Apple. Press Gazette reports that CNN’s U.S. web traffic in July was down 32 percent from a year earlier. Fox was down as well, but only 11 percent. CNN has brand, programming and credibility problems that no distribution agreement can solve.
But the larger lesson remains. For decades, legacy media outlets benefited not only from their brands but also from privileged access to the means of distribution. In the television era, that meant cable carriage. In the digital era, it increasingly means placement on the phones, apps, search results and news feeds Americans use every day.
The lesson from Fox’s rise on cable was never that conservative media needed special treatment. It was that conservative media needed the opportunity to compete. Give Americans access to CNN and Fox News and let them decide what they want to watch. We know how that competition turned out.
The same principle should apply online. Apple does not need to promote Fox News. Google does not need to promote conservative media. MSN and Yahoo do not need to tilt their algorithms to the right.
They need to stop tilting the playing field to the left.
FoxNews.com just passed CNN.com without any great assist from Apple News. It happened nine months after CNN lost one of the most powerful distribution advantages in digital news.
Maybe that is a coincidence.
Or maybe we are watching history repeat itself.
