After another round of false claims aired on its programs, Fox News suddenly found itself doing something viewers almost never see: issuing multiple on-air apologies.
On Friday morning, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo abruptly paused her show to deliver an on-air apology tied to comments made weeks earlier by Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary, who had pushed an unsubstantiated allegation about opponents of his Utah data center project.
And this wasn’t a quiet correction buried in fine print. It was the full on-air treatment.
“Mr. O’Leary has now corrected the record and explained that he has no evidence that the Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Josh Kanter, Taylor Knuth, or Gabriel Finlayson are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party,” Bartiromo read.
She continued: “Fox News Media is likewise aware of no evidence that they are funded by, acting at the direction of, or coordinating with Chinese interests in opposing Kevin O’Leary’s project. Fox News Media apologizes for the error.”
On-screen, Bartiromo also displayed O’Leary’s own retraction post, in which he acknowledged—carefully, and without much fanfare—that he had no evidence linking the project’s opponents to China or any Chinese government entity.
What he did not include in that correction: an actual apology.
That detail stood out.
Back in May, O’Leary had gone on Bartiromo’s program wearing a “Utah National Security” hat and floated a sweeping claim about the data center opposition.
“Who would want us to stop building our electrical grid?” he asked. “Who would want to stop us from having the computing capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that? There’s only one. It’s China.”
It was a confident answer to a question he didn’t actually have evidence for.
Bartiromo wasn’t the only Fox personality pulled into the cleanup effort.
Other hosts, including Johnny Joey Jones and former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, also read similar on-air corrections after O’Leary walked back his claims.
According to reporting by Status’ Oliver Darcy, the coordinated nature of the retractions is unusual for Fox News, a network not exactly known for public course corrections or on-air mea culpas.
Darcy described it as a “coordinated cleanup effort” and noted that the timing suggests more than just casual editorial concern.
“What exactly prompted O’Leary and Fox to embark on this unusual apology tour remains unclear,” Darcy wrote, “but it’s a safe bet that a legal threat was involved.”
Once O’Leary acknowledged there was no evidence for his claims, the network was left in a position it tends to avoid: publicly correcting the record.
The episode lands in a broader context Fox News is very familiar with.
In 2023, the network agreed to a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems after a defamation lawsuit tied to false claims about the 2020 election.
That case reshaped how Fox handles certain on-air allegations, at least when legal exposure becomes too hard to ignore.
Friday’s apology didn’t reference that history.
But it didn’t need to. The pattern speaks for itself: big claims go out on air, and sometimes, the cleanup comes later, right back on air too.
Watch the video below:
FOX issues an apology: Kevin O'Leary appeared as a guest on the show and discussed the ongoing controversy surrounding his planned data center project in Utah and made claims relating to the opponents of his product.
Mr. O'Leary has now corrected the record and explained he has… pic.twitter.com/dh1Y89DPOt
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 28, 2026
