Fox Undercover Boston Investigated

Fox Undercover INVESTIGATED is the effort of a group of community members who believe that the Boston Area community has a right to know the facts behind the historical Fox Undercover Boston “news” segments so that they can more critically analyze the show, should they encounter it, arm their schools and community organizations to protect against an invasion and most importantly to protect their children by exposing motivational realities behind Fox and their “informants”. 

Fox Undercover Boston or (aka Fox Undercover) is a subset of Fox 25 News Boston which generally runs a few times a month, during Fox 25’s 10pm news except during sweeps periods (such as November) when segments might run several times per week although lately the segments can run during other times in the later evening.  Fox Undercover segments generally spotlight individual people who fall into scapegoat populations such as sex offenders, politically liberal judges, people who acted in porn, minor government workers, and more recently, elected officials.  Segments are almost always previewed throughout the day on Fox 25 television station by following a national trailer for a network show by a subtrailer which typically begins with “…then on Fox Undercover…..”.  The trailers are very important for Fox 25 to provide a “hitch” that might interest watchers of Fox Networks popular prime time shows into watching the local Fox 25 news as well.   Trailers often run on radio as well.

It is important to know that Fox 25 is not locally owned, as they might have you think.  While Maria Stephanos may be local, Mike Beaudet is from Western MA (not considered Greater Boston in by any standard) and according to former employee Kim Carrigan in this interview with CBS, it is often hard to tell exactly where decisions at the top are coming from (sic).

The segments themselves generally play on ignorance;  weak, speculative or incomplete facts; blind trust in media, and most significantly into societal anger, frustration and fears.  Although segments will occasionally just expose a government project which is asserted to be wasteful, the majority of segments focus on the mistakes, errors, accusations or shortcomings of one individual person.  Historically, the target was often a non-public figure (or a government functionary) who would have little political clout, zero experience dealing with media and thus could appear small and weak when pitted against Fox.  (In the past year or so, there has been a trend towards public figures but this is likely to just be cyclical since politics are so polarized at the moment.)  Although Fox investigative reporter Mike Beaudet claims to always ask his subjects of investigation for interviews before “putting a microphone in their face”, the overwhelming majority of episodes show Beaudet surprising an individual with questions which the target is unprepared for.  Beaudet appears to tower over his surprised subjects, and by catching them off guard, insures that his baited questions will not result in a balanced interview.  To the contrary, Beaudet’s interviews don’t appear to ever do anything other than to generate bias, fear and hate towards the target or target agency.   His questions rarely amount to more than gotcha questions, that simply leave the interviewee lost for words.  Beaudet recently called a target a chicken for not talking to him, however we cannot find a Fox Undercover investigation in history which truly presented a story which the viewer could come down to either side on.  The foregone conclusion, appears to result always in a smear campaign, a character assassination or badly skewed outcome.  Beaudet has also taken recently to using hard to prove allegations about popular subjects, spinning them as if they may be proven, and setting himself up to seem like the first on the block to take credit for uncovering them, if they turn out to have merit. 

And if Beaudet does actually ask for interviews as a first approach, it does not appear that anyone trusts his journalistic integrity enough to grant one.  Lieutenant Government Tim Murray who was put in the hot seat over crashing his car, refused to be interviewed by Beaudet even though he did grant interviews to another investigative reporter, Janet Wu of Channel 5.  He even granted an interview to Fox 25’s Maria Stephanos later on, to show his impartiality towards stations.

This site will look comprehensively about the management and personnel behind Fox 25 News including the ex-Executive Producer Jonathan Wells who was let go at the end of his contract year in 2010, the instability of the news station to hire and retain experienced trusted journalists (see this recent list here) and the play between Fox 25’s and its parent company, News Corp.   It will also look at trends such as the involvement of Community Voices Laurie Myers, or the kid gloves used on stories about police.  Beaudet will also try to take the credit for another Aaron Hernandez "spotting" and has covered the ex New England Patriot (and we don't criticize this, by the way).

Even if none of this interests you and, as is the case with the largest percentage of Boston Area Residents you simply don’t watch Fox 25 News at all, if you live in a Boston area community you and your family are at risk this very day of potential harm which we will explain clearly, unbiasedly and in detail.   It is not the history of News Corp or Mike Beaudet to publicly admit wrong doing, to respond to criticism, blogs, petitions and complaints.  Quite often, News Corp will actually take oppositional action, asserting its write to exploit the airways and appear in a position of power.  Thus we encourage people to not respond to or blog about this site with any such action, but to simply ignore Fox 25, turn it off, and arm your community in ways that we will describe below.