NEW YORK — In what media analysts are calling "the most ambitious crossover event since the military-industrial complex discovered content marketing," Fox News Media announced Tuesday that it has spent the past year working with Palantir Technologies — the defense contractor best known for helping governments identify threats abroad — to build AI tools that identify what threats Americans should be worried about at home, specifically while eating mozzarella sticks at a chain restaurant.

The partnership, which was kept secret for twelve months while engineers quietly A/B tested your father-in-law's amygdala, has produced a suite of proprietary tools including "Topic Radar," a military-grade AI system that finally solves journalism's oldest question: "What should retirees in swing states fear today?"

"This is a business arrangement," Fox News Digital president Porter Berry told Axios, in what sources confirmed was the first time a Palantir client has openly bragged about paying for domestic psychological operations. "We hired them."

Berry — who holds the titles of president, editor-in-chief, AND president of new media, giving him more presidencies than his network has content warnings — emphasized that the AI would not replace human journalists. "This is a human end-to-end process, and in the middle is AI," he explained, inadvertently describing what experts are calling "the propaganda sandwich model": humans provide the grievance, AI provides the scale, and Rupert Murdoch provides the yacht.

The crown jewel of the partnership is "Topic Radar," a tool that Palantir engineers embedded in the newsroom — using the same terminology they use for war zones, which sources described as "finally honest about the nature of the operation" — built to help reporters "quickly get up to speed on a particular story through a custom briefing." Industry observers noted this elegantly solves journalism's biggest problem: reporters accidentally learning context.

A second tool, "Article Insights," analyzes the performance of Fox News digital articles to identify why certain fear-based content underperformed. According to leaked internal documents obtained by HuckFinn (we made them up), the AI's most common recommendations include "add WOKE to headline," "insert more caravan B-roll," and "reduce verifiable claims by 40%."

The third tool, "Text Editor," checks articles against Fox News' official style guide. Sources familiar with the system say the AI now algorithmically enforces proper usage of scare quotes around "election results," mandatory capitalization of ILLEGAL ALIEN, and the house rule requiring all vaccine references to include "so-called" as a prefix.

Perhaps most notably, Fox News structured its deals with Palantir and other AI partners — including OpenAI, whose "benefit all humanity" mission now apparently includes Hannity monologues — to prevent the AI from training on Fox content. The network treats its fabricated narratives as trade secrets, which industry lawyers confirm is technically accurate, since disinformation at this quality level IS proprietary intellectual property.

"We're very protective of our IP," Berry said, referring to content that has cost the network $787.5 million in a single defamation settlement.

The Axios report noted that most newsrooms cannot afford enterprise AI deals, meaning the wealth gap now extends to misinformation production capabilities. "Poor outlets are stuck manufacturing consent by hand, like peasants," explained one media economist. "Fox can automate at scale."

Meanwhile, individual Fox teams are now "expected to constantly experiment" with AI tools and build custom GPTs for their departments. Sources say the Opinion desk's custom AI is functionally equivalent to a Magic 8-Ball that only outputs "Just Asking Questions" and "Some People Say."

When reached for comment, a Palantir spokesperson provided a statement reading, in its entirety, "We help our clients see." The spokesperson declined to elaborate on what exactly Fox News viewers would now be seeing, though internal metrics suggest "more of the same, but faster."

Alex Karp, Palantir's CEO, who recently told Axios that America must "absorb a lot of risk" on artificial intelligence, is reportedly pleased that this risk is now being absorbed directly into the limbic systems of millions of Americans, right on schedule.

The partnership comes as Fox News remains, according to the Axios report, "the most profitable arm of Fox Corp" — a detail presented without commentary, as though fear-mongering-as-a-service is simply a normal business model and not the entire thesis of the operation.

In a related development, Axios illustrated its report with an image of a robot holding a television remote, which critics noted accidentally depicted the average Fox viewer circa 2026.

The entire story was written in Axios' signature bloodless trade-publication tone, framing "surveillance contractor optimizes propaganda machine" as an exciting B2B SaaS product launch. The article's "What To Read Next" section recommended "Alex Karp Unplugged" — unplugged from what remains unclear, though ethics and the Geneva Convention have both been suggested.

As of press time, Fox News' AI systems had already identified this HuckFinn article as a threat vector and recommended a counter-narrative involving Hunter Biden's laptop, critical race theory, and something about litter boxes in schools.

Editor's note: This is satire. But honestly, is it though?