Fox News

Fox News is a television news outlet in the novel’s account of the spreading catastrophe, first part of the sisters’ effort to understand events and later a channel for repeated reports and government warnings. Its coverage helps make “The Problem” a public name for the crisis, while the increasingly stark instructions it carries underscore how quickly ordinary public life is being shut down.

Crisis Coverage

During the first months of the outbreak, Malorie and Shannon watch Fox News alongside CNN and MSNBC, keeping up with reports even as the stories repeat until the sisters can no longer bear to watch. Malorie initially holds to the hope that the crisis will pass, while Shannon becomes increasingly serious. Their different responses play out against the same continuous stream of news: information is available, but it offers neither a clear explanation nor a reassuring resolution.

Fox News also reports the mounting pattern of suicides associated with what people call “The Problem.” In Malorie’s account, the channel repeats that phrase so often that its coverage turns to synonyms: “Self-destruction,” “Self-immolation,” and “Hari-kari.” One anchorman’s phrase, “personal erasing,” fails to catch on. The changing vocabulary registers an attempt to describe a crisis whose consequences are visible even when its cause remains unknown.

Warnings and Public Breakdown

The broadcasts carry government instructions on screen: a national curfew is mandated, and people are advised to lock their doors, cover their windows, and, above all, not look outside. The warning translates the unseen danger into immediate household precautions. In Malorie’s perception, the measures amount to the closing down of the outdoors and the world beyond it; the broadcast is not simply reporting events but delivering rules for living under emergency conditions.

That public guidance arrives alongside a collapse in ordinary communication. The sisters’ television-watching becomes part of a larger disappearance of outside contact, and by the time Malorie reaches the house shared by survivors, there is no Internet, newspapers or mail, and mobile phones have stopped working. The house still has a landline and electricity, but neither gives its occupants a dependable connection to news or help. The earlier television reports thus belong to a brief phase when the crisis could still be encountered as public information, before isolation becomes the defining condition of survival.

From Broadcast to Isolation

The novel places Fox News within a changing media environment rather than presenting it as a source of answers. Its reports transmit stories and official warnings, but the information does not explain what people are seeing or why it drives them to harm themselves and others. As the sisters retreat indoors and the crisis deepens, television’s repeated stories become both a remaining link to events and evidence of how little the available coverage can resolve.

Later, the survivors’ radio offers a contrasting, diminished form of connection: its last remaining DJ, Rodney Barrett, has nothing new to tell them and rambles, yet the housemates continue listening because his voice is their final link to the outside world. The contrast clarifies Fox News’s place in the chronology. It belongs to the earlier period of televised reporting and public instruction; the later struggle is to preserve even a thin thread of contact after the systems that carried information have begun to fail.