Key Points
- Fox News Media will launch a 90-second news-focused interstitial, “Fox News Report,” airing daily on 18 Fox-owned broadcast stations starting February 24.
- Anchored by congressional correspondent Bill Melugin, the segment will run around 5:58 p.m. Eastern Time, with access also provided to independent Fox affiliates.
- The move revives a long-dormant broadcast format and could blur lines between Fox News Media and local stations amid ongoing FCC scrutiny.
Fox News Media is reviving the news break for broadcast television.
Starting later this month, the operator of the Fox News Channel will start producing a 90-second interstitial called “Fox News Report,” which will air on the company’s 18 owned-and-operated Fox broadcast TV stations across the country, including outlets in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
Fox News Report will be anchored by Bill Melugin, the network’s Congressional correspondent who joined the Fox News Channel from KTTV (Channel 11, Fox) in Los Angeles five years ago.
Fox News Media says the reports will air daily around 5:58 p.m. Eastern Time, and three hours later for its West Coast stations. Independently-owned Fox affiliates will also have access to Fox News Report through the company’s editorial distribution service.
Network news interstitials were a common appearance in the early days of television, with the three largest broadcast networks — ABC, CBS and Fox — offering short updates throughout the day and into prime-time hours at a time when most Americans still started their day with the newspaper.
The interstitials allowed viewers to receive timely updates on domestic and international news events, and served as a promotional tool for evening and late night newscasts.
Commonly referred to as a “cut-in” in industry parlance, the news interstitials stopped airing on the three major broadcast networks by the late 1990s as more Americans connected to the Internet at work and at home. Fox has never aired network news interstitials on its owned or affiliated stations, beyond the occasional breaking news update.
The Fox News Report interstitial that is rolling out to stations on February 24 has the potential to blur the line between Fox News Media — which typically doesn’t involve itself in local news programming — and the local stations that fall under common ownership.
That line became a central element in a petition brought by a grassroots organization called the Media and Democracy (MAD) Project, which asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to block a routine renewal application for a broadcast license associated with Philadelphia TV station WTXF (Channel 29), which Fox owns.
In that case, the MAD Project said a settlement reached between Fox News Media and Dominion Voting Systems over election-related conspiracy theories aired on the cable news channel after the 2020 presidential election stood as proof that Fox could not pass the “character fitness” test required to hold a license for WTXF.
Fox successfully argued that its local broadcast stations produced their own news that fell outside the scope of Fox News Media, which operates Fox’s cable networks and related businesses. Aside from a single one-hour news show aired on Sundays, the company also said Fox News Media did not air news programming on its local TV stations.
The FCC dismissed MAD Project’s petition in January 2025, with then-FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel saying the request was politically-motivated. The MAD Project has appealed the decision.
