Fox News has been pouring its energy into hyping up the so-called “liberal outrage” over Sydney Sweeney’s new American Eagle ad even though hardly any actual Democrats or major figures have commented on it. According to Media Matters, the network spent more than 85 minutes talking about Sweeney this week, while giving only three minutes to the major story dominating other outlets: the Trump administration’s messy handling of the Epstein files and Trump’s own bizarre claim that Epstein “stole” Virginia Giuffre from Mar-a-Lago. With the Epstein scandal raising new questions and the White House scrambling, Fox has leaned heavily into the Sweeney discourse, pushing the idea that the left is furious about the ad even though most of the “outrage” is coming from random social-media users.
This focus is working exactly like a distraction cycle. As MSNBC and CNN talk about Epstein hundreds of times, Fox keeps feeding its audience a safer, flashier storyline: Sweeney’s ad, “liberal meltdown,” and culture-war commentary. Meanwhile, Republicans and MAGA media figures avoid engaging with the Epstein fallout, including Trump hinting he could pardon Ghislaine Maxwell. The result is that Sydney Sweeney becomes a convenient political decoy, soaking up airtime just as momentum builds to release the Epstein files. In other words, the coverage makes it look like she’s being used as a distraction to shield Republicans from one of the biggest scandals pressing in on them right now.
