The program features Fox News correspondents and guests analyzing issues in shorter-form segments, which typically run no more than three or four minutes per story.

The program eschews the use of "talking heads", and focuses on field reporting and comments from individuals directly involved in the story.

"Across America" is a similarly formatted segment – albeit not subject to time restrictions – which features human interest stories culled from local newscasts seen on affiliates of the Fox broadcast network.

The Fox Report was rebroadcast at 2:00 a.m. Eastern Time weeknights from the program's debut until the late-night airing was replaced by the comedy/news commentary show Red Eye on February 6, 2007.

When Fox News Channel launched on October 7, 1996, the network debuted its first "regular" evening newscast, The Schneider Report.

After Schneider left FNC in 1997, the program was reformatted as the Fox News Report, with Jon Scott and Catherine Crier taking over as co-anchors.

[4][5] Throughout 2007, the program shifted toward a more serious tone, removing pre-break story teasers, jokes, and a number of other elements, including the "G-Block", a segment featuring mostly entertainment and celebrity news (which became notable for an incident in November 2002 that eventually went viral in which Shepard Smith made a slip of the tongue during a story on Jennifer Lopez, mistakenly stating that residents from the Bronx neighborhood where the actress/singer grew up would rather give her a "curb job than a blow job, er... a bl-block party" if she returned there).

Shepard Smith presented the show from a modified Studio 12H that featured additional monitors as well as "The Cube," although the overhead platform and accompanying staircase (which had been part of the set since 2008) were removed.