John Fetterman has spent most of 2026 collecting Fox News appearances like trading cards.
Now he wants credit for being blacklisted by the left-wing media he keeps publicly snubbing.
And Fetterman just got called out in a way that has the Pennsylvania senator’s whole “moderate” act looking a lot shakier than he’d like.
Fetterman’s Complaint and the Network’s Swift Rebuttal
Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) told the Washington Examiner in a recent exclusive interview that MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, won’t invite him on its programs, though he said he appears on Fox News, CNN, CBS, and ABC. “But I hope you can print: ‘MSNBC won’t invite me on,'” he told the publication.
Fetterman said he didn’t know why the network was keeping him off the air. “I mean, I’m a committed Democrat,” he said. “I’m not sure what their editorial issue is with.” He called it “really strange” that a network like MS NOW wouldn’t book a senator who “votes a 90-something percent line.”
MS NOW rebutted Senator Fetterman’s claim that the network won’t invite him on as a guest in a statement to Mediaite. A spokesperson for MS NOW called Fetterman’s “claim is inaccurate” and, after press time, MS NOW’s public relations team responded on social media with images of Fetterman’s appearances on their network between November 2025 and March of this year.
So the network produced receipts. Fetterman produced a grievance. Make of that what you will.
Fifty-Six Fox Appearances and Counting
The Washington Examiner, upon vetting nearly 750 videos mentioning his name since the start of this year, identified over 56 appearances by Fetterman on Fox News as of mid-July. Fetterman has become one of Fox News’s favorite Democratic guests as questions mount over his increasingly strained relationship with his own party.
A Washington Examiner analysis confirmed Fetterman has appeared on Fox News at least 56 times since the start of the year, while CNN has had the Pennsylvania senator on 13 times in the same period.
When asked by the Washington Examiner why he has appeared on Fox so frequently, Fetterman joked, “It’s because I’m handsome. That’s a way into my male modeling career.” He added, “No, but I mean, I’d be happy to talk to anybody. I mean, like, yes, I get more invitations from Fox, but I’m happy to go on MSNBC or CNN.”
Twice a week on Fox News for a sitting Democrat senator. That’s not a scheduling quirk. That’s a pattern.
And the pattern tells the real story here, which is that Fetterman has spent the better part of this year cultivating a media persona as the reasonable Democrat willing to talk to the other side, while his actual Senate voting record tells a very different story. Fetterman himself acknowledged it: “I vote a 91% Democratic line, and if Democrats have a problem with somebody that votes 91% of the same times as you are, more than nine out of 10 times, then maybe our party has a bigger problem.”
That’s not a moderate. That’s a reliable Democrat vote with better TV instincts than his colleagues.
The Red Line Performance and What Fetterman Actually Supports
Don’t let the gym shorts and the Fox News bookings fool you. For all the times Fetterman has criticized his fellow Democrats or seemed to give the benefit of the doubt to Donald Trump, he has repeated a refrain: he’ll never switch parties, in part because he supports LGBTQ people and abortion rights. “I will always stand with the LGBTQ+ community and fight for Americans’ ability to make their own medical decisions,” Fetterman said in a statement.
Fetterman’s pledge to “stand up to attacks on Planned Parenthood” is, as one outlet noted, not particularly surprising, because support for abortion rights is a bedrock principle for Democrats. Planned Parenthood, which receives hundreds of millions in federal funding annually while performing hundreds of thousands of abortions each year, counts Fetterman as a reliable ally. That’s worth remembering the next time he shows up on Fox News in a hoodie talking about how the Democrat Party has lost touch with regular people.
But the performance continues. Fetterman recently threatened to leave the Democrat Party over its decreasing support of Israel, telling Fox News, “That’s my red line.”
Fetterman said he has “no plans” to leave the Democrat Party, but if it officially became the “anti-Israel party,” count him out. “If our party ever becomes, and just makes it official, the anti-Israel party, that’s when I would leave because that’s been a moral clarity for me,” he said at a recent summit hosted by The Hill.
Fetterman’s approval ratings in Pennsylvania have fallen to 19% among Democrats, according to a Quinnipiac poll. The same poll revealed that 52% of Pennsylvania’s registered voters want Fetterman to leave the party.
So the base hates him, the network he’s complaining about says he’s welcome any time, and he keeps showing up on Fox News twice a week. And he’s up for re-election in 2028 in a state that’s trending red. None of this is coincidental.
Fetterman is not a moderate who stumbled into Trump-friendly territory. He is a career Democrat who supports abortion-on-demand, gun control, taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, and transgender ideology in the military, doing an extended impression of a guy who might one day vote with Republicans on something that actually matters. According to a VoteHub analysis, Fetterman voted in line with President Donald Trump just 28% of the time last year, the most of any Senate Democrat. That’s the ceiling. That’s as far right as it goes.
But the branding is working well enough that he can complain about being blacklisted by a left-wing cable network, get called out by that network’s own spokesperson, and still walk away looking like the victim of liberal media bias.
And as for MS NOW itself — the network formerly known as MSNBC changed its name to MS NOW, which stands for My Source News Opinion World, as part of the cable channel’s spinoff from the Comcast-owned media company NBCUniversal. The drastic rebranding came after Comcast spun off its cable assets into a new company named Versant, and executives from both sides wanted to distance the progressive network from the NBC News brand. Same left-wing editorial lineup, new logo, new name, and apparently a PR team sharp enough to fact-check a sitting senator in real time.
Fetterman wanted a headline that read “MSNBC won’t invite me on.” What he got instead was a network producing screenshots proving he was there just a few months ago. That’s not the kind of press that helps a guy who’s already polling at 19% with his own party faithful.
The 2028 Pennsylvania Senate race is still two years away. But Fetterman is clearly already running — just not as a Democrat in any meaningful sense of the word. He’s running as a character, the working-class senator who talks straight and goes on Fox News and complains about left-wing media. It’s a good character. It just doesn’t match the voting record.
And the voters of Pennsylvania, who have been watching this act for a while now, are going to have to decide whether the performance is worth another six years.
Sources: Mediaite; Washington Examiner; Fox News; CBS News; WESA; Quinnipiac University Poll; VoteHub; NBC News; The Hill