Fox News tried to dunk on the WNBA. It missed

Every summer, conservative television hosts and influencers suddenly discover women’s professional basketball, which they insist they don’t care about, and then they spend weeks explaining why it’s one of society’s greatest ills. This year, just like last, their attempts to turn the WNBA into a proxy war for cultural grievances is failing because it’s not really about the league. 

It is a content farm built using Caitlin Clark, her Indiana Fever teammate Sophie Cunningham and a nonexistent transgender player controversy to conceal old grievances about race and gender. But despite the attempts to sully the WNBA brand, the league is thriving — and the whole spectacle is now backfiring in ways even the people profiting from it can no longer hide. 

The right has attacked the WNBA since at least Brittney Griner’s 2022 imprisonment in Russia. In 2025, the Onion ran a spoof headline imagining the State Department designating the league a terrorist organization. It was funny because it wasn’t that far off from how conservative media actually treats the WNBA until football arrives to distract them. 

For three seasons, Clark has been the perfect vessel for this project. The former Iowa superstar entered the WNBA as the all-time leading scorer in women’s Division I basketball, and she arrived in Indianapolis with a massive audience already attached to her. That made her an irresistible figure for a right-wing media ecosystem constantly searching for a new culture war protagonist. Fox built out what it called a “hard contact timeline” for Clark, who is white in a league where 70% of the players are Black. This helped lay the groundwork for MAGA media’s narrative: that the WNBA is being handed a gift by a white star, and it is responding with ingratitude. 

This year they have taken that myth further than ever, and Media Matters for America put a number on exactly how far. Since June 25, when Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas, who is Black, picked up a flagrant foul on Clark, Fox News has aired at least 206 segments and devoted more than 13 and a half hours of programming to the WNBA, sprawled across “The Five,” “The Ingraham Angle,” “Hannity” and “Gutfeld!” More than eight of those hours, according to the analysis, have gone specifically to relitigating the issue of trans athletes in a league that has none.

This inconvenient reality has turned the right-wing media circus into an absurd performance art piece. Pundits have resorted to inventing entirely fictional scenarios to keep their audiences angry. Outkick founder Clay Travis offered to bankroll a completely fake expansion team in Nashville just to stock it with a 100% transgender roster. Cunningham’s comments in an interview with ESPN opposing trans inclusion in women’s sports gave this machinery another opening. Fox’s coverage pivoted from hard fouls to trans panic, Clark got dragged into a fight she has spent three years trying to avoid and Cunningham’s follower count exploded. Former NBA players like Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White are now engaged in publicity stunts declaring themselves eligible for future drafts under the cynical guise of identifying as women. 

The wall-to-wall outrage manufactured by Fox News and its allies has even appeared to tire the network’s host Jesse Watters, who is no stranger to being aggrieved by so-called wokeness. “This is week three of ‘The Five’ covering the WNBA,” he recently complained, “and I have to say, I’m done.” 

The on-the-ground consequences have not been abstract. When the Fever traveled to play Seattle Storm, two teenage fans wore shirts referencing XX and XY chromosomes and carried a sign thanking Cunningham for “speaking up for girls.” Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton confronted them, allegedly cursing at the girls and calling them “insane,” conduct serious enough that the league fined and suspended her for five home games, an extraordinarily rare disciplinary step against a team owner. The Storm apologized. Cunningham called Keaton’s behavior “truly embarrassing” while also attempting to distance herself from her previous anti-trans comments, stressing that trans women, trans men and everyone else are welcome “at her table.” Fox News Digital and Outkick turned the two teenagers into viral martyrs, while British novelist and anti-trans activist J.K. Rowling pronounced them “heroines” to her tens of millions of social media followers. Independent activist Jennifer Sey, whose XX-XY Athletics brand produced the shirts, and Riley Gaines, the former collegiate swimmer who has built a podcast career on her anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy and a fifth-place tie in a college championship, both showed up courtside for the Fever’s next game against the Minnesota Lynx.

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Beneath the surface of the fabricated trans panic lies an even uglier dynamic driven by racial resentment and the commodification of Clark and Cunningham. Right-wing media outlets have tried desperately to cast Clark as a conservative culture war martyr, claiming she is the helpless victim of a mass conspiracy and anti-white racism orchestrated by her peers. President Donald Trump weighed in on Thomas’ foul on Clark, saying the Fever guard was “treated rather rough.” Newsmax host Greg Kelly said the league should have “the cops” show up and start making arrests over the common basketball foul. Eleven House Republicans led by Texas Rep. August Pfluger wrote to Commissioner Cathy Engelbert speculating that rough play against Clark “may be racially motivated” and threatening federal investigation. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, presiding over a state with no WNBA franchise, threatened to prosecute players for assault. On Fox News, the Federalist’s Brianna Lyman argued that “the bigger problem in the WNBA right now is anti-white racism,” while a recent Washington Examiner op-ed argued that “The WNBA has a black entitlement problem.”

Clark herself has repeatedly said she doesn’t want to be used this way, that harassment of any kind isn’t acceptable and that she stands with her Black colleagues in the league. It hasn’t mattered. Conservative commentators have attacked her from the other direction for refusing to take their side on trans athletes. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called her “the biggest coward in the history of sports.”

This is a classic MAGA media pattern: Elevate a woman as a brave truth-teller only until she exercises independent judgment. Fox News even tried to flip the whole thing on the left, writing in its Outkick vertical, “Now, they all want [Clark] to shut up and dribble.” The aggressive pushback against Black stars like Angel Reese and DiJonai Carrington, meanwhile, demonstrates that the conservative media apparatus views the surging popularity of women’s basketball primarily through a racialized lens.

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And yet the plan is not working — at least not in the way its architects intended. Rather than capitulating to the relentless pressure from right-wing pundits and political actors, the broader WNBA community has mounted a fierce and inspiring defense of its players and values. The league issued strong statements making it abundantly clear that its players will not be used as political pawns for reactionary internet trolls. Fans have shown up waving Trans Pride flags. Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve wore a shirt reading “Trans kids belong” on an ESPN broadcast and told reporters plainly that “there is a faction of people in our country that are making this a massive issue.” Fans of the opposing Golden State Valkyries cheered Carrington’s return to Chase Center after the outrage over her Aug. 8 flagrant foul against Cunningham. 

Meanwhile, the business the right claims to be so worried about keeps expanding, regardless of how loudly Fox tries to poison it. The league signed an 11-year media rights agreement — worth roughly $2 billion — with Disney, Amazon and NBC that took effect in 2025. Viewership was up 23% that season and ticket sales increased by 26%, and the new collective bargaining agreement ratified this spring raised the team salary cap from roughly $1.5 to $7 million, the largest single jump in the history of American professional sports labor, with players now guaranteed a real share of league revenue for the first time. 

None of this happened because Fox News decided to help. It happened because millions of people, including plenty who have never watched a minute of Fox in their lives, decided the games were worth watching on their own terms.

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