The Presidential Election That Put Fox News On the Map
50:15 Share

From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And on this week's show, we take a trip back in time to when Fox News was just finding its feet as a conservative outlet. As they passed each other, Kennedy made a prediction about the presidential race. I think our guys got this.

I had a physical reaction. My head snapped back. And I thought, our guy? Who's our guy? Fox News now projects George W. Bush the winner in Florida, and thus it appears the winner of the presidency of the United States. I watched Fox all night, and I think it was misinformation for us to be told things. And it turns out that your analyst there was the cousin of George Bush. I would tell people, they'd ask, what do you do? I work for Fox News. And they'd say, oh, man, Fox. I love Fox. That's all I watch.

And I would say to them, don't do that to your brain. It's all coming up after this. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

What if comparing car insurance rates was as easy as putting on your favorite podcast? With Progressive, it is. Just visit the Progressive website to quote with all the coverages you want. You'll see Progressive's direct rate. Then their tool will provide options from other companies so you can compare. All you need to do is choose the rate and coverage you like. Quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

Hey, it's Latif from Radiolab. Our goal with each episode is to make you think, how did I live this long and not know that? Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen wherever you get podcasts.

From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Early on in the history of this show, I'm talking a couple of decades now, we realized that we probably could dedicate every episode to a Fox News outrage. Roger Ailes' fair and balanced network was constantly pushing the boundaries of what was then acceptable for a news organization and changing the nature of our political discourse in the process. What?

But given all we needed to cover, it made sense just to check back in when Fox did something too appalling to ignore, even as we became more and more inured to the Fox News way.

The Fox News Channel has been on the air for almost three decades now, but it hasn't always had the political power it does today. The newest series of Slate's long-running podcast, Slow Burn, is a detailed history of the network's early years.

And for this hour, we're airing episode one, titled, We Report, You Can Suck It, which zeroes in on the election night that changed everything. Here's your host, Josh Levine. Mike Schneider was getting ready for one of the biggest moments of his journalism career.

It was November 1996, and he was about to anchor election night coverage on a national television network. Mike had been an anchor and correspondent on The Today Show, Good Morning America, and Nightline. Over decades, he'd built his name as a solid old-school journalist. Be honest. Be fair.

Don't be boring, but don't hype anything up. Just go tell the story. It also didn't hurt that he looked the part. I had a face where grandmas thought that their daughters might be interested in seeing young Mr. Schneider. By the mid-90s, Mike wasn't quite as fresh-faced as he used to be. But just when his time as a TV news star seemed to be running out, he'd gotten an opportunity he hadn't expected. ♪

Roger came to me and he said, "Listen, I would like you to anchor our newscast of record every evening." Roger was Roger Ailes, the chairman and CEO of the brand new Fox News Channel. And he wanted Mike front and center. So, I want to know why.

I mean, maybe part of its ego. I'm looking for a compliment. I don't know. And he said, because I think you're one of the best anchors in the country and because you have a reputation for fairness. Mike knew that Ailes had a reputation for pushing his conservative views. But that fairness line hit his ear just right. If they really wanted to do this and they really wanted to do it right, I felt, OK, let's see where they want to take this thing.

And then we're off to the races. News the way you want it, when you want it. The Schneider Report, weeknights, Fox News Channel. But when Fox News debuted in the fall of 1996, it wasn't available on some of the country's biggest cable systems, including Time Warner in Manhattan. That's why Mike's fans didn't know that he was still on TV. We used to watch you on ABC or NBC. Where have you been? What are you doing? And I'd say on the Fox News Channel.

Where can I see it? You can't. But on November 5th, 1996, everything was supposed to change. On election night, we would be on the air with comprehensive coverage, a full, traditional election night show. That election night, with Bob Dole challenging Bill Clinton, would be Fox News' first big showcase. A chance for this cable TV upstart to prove it was a serious player.

The plan was for the whole show to get simulcast on the Fox broadcast network, the channel that showed NFL games and The Simpsons. Pretty much anyone with a TV could watch broadcast Fox. That meant Mike and the cable Fox News channel would get a massive promotional boost. The idea of me in the anchor chair that night, I was jazzed. Then what actually happened on election night? That was a s*** show.

Imagine something that could go wrong on a live television show. It probably happened to Fox News on election night. The actual broadcast signal kept fizzling. The sound went in and out. When Mike and his co-anchor, Catherine Cryer, tried to go live to a reporter in Arkansas, it just didn't work.

After only a few minutes, they had to abandon everything and just roll a half hour of taped footage about congressional races. In complete honesty, I'll tell you what was happening off camera. In those days, you would have a phone on the set where you'd pick it up to talk to the producer in control room.

And I said, what are we doing next? What are we doing next? What are we doing next? And they, I'll get back to you in a minute. Get back to you in a minute. And I said, okay, if nobody's going to answer this phone, I guess we don't need the phone. So I ripped the phone off the wall and I threw it across the studio. Made a point. When I asked you to picture what could go wrong on live TV, you may have imagined some bad technical glitches and a frustrated anchor. But something else happened that night that I'm guessing you haven't thought of.

Remember how Mike had been promised that his big election special would get shown on the broadcast Fox network? Well, that didn't happen. Tonight, Fox presents a special movie presentation... Do you remember the movie that they showed? Oh God, I don't know. This election day, America is going to the dogs.

Beethoven. With 200 pounds of shedding, drooling. Beethoven? Oh, the Charles Grodin film? Holy s***. Put some bite into your election night on Non-Stop Fox. Mike didn't get totally drowned out by a drooling St. Bernard. Twice an hour during commercial breaks, the Fox News hosts would pop in to give updates on the race.

You can see that Mr. Clinton has now amassed 367 electoral votes, according to our account. Roger Ailes claimed he was fine with getting preempted by a dog movie, because it wasn't a dramatic presidential race anyway. But critics weren't buying the spin. They called Fox News disorganized, incompetent, and laughably inept. Ailes and Fox's billionaire founder, Rupert Murdoch, had been touting their grand ambitions to take over TV news.

But chances were, it wasn't going to survive long enough to redeem itself. "Viewership is dismal, and some analysts say that Rupert Murdoch has overreached again." That's how things looked in 1996. But Fox News Channel wouldn't stay inept or invisible for long. Four years later, it was on the air all over the country. It looked and sounded different than its TV rivals, full of eye-catching graphics and blaring sound effects.

And when the next big election came around in November 2000, Fox would captivate the nation and just maybe change the fate of American democracy. Who will be the next president? You decide in two days. Election Day coverage only on the Fox News Channel.

In just a few years, the Fox News Channel went from nonexistent to bumbling to seemingly invincible. Its sudden, shocking emergence as a cultural force and political kingmaker transformed the country and left a mark on all of us along the way. Today, as another election approaches, Fox's future prospects feel totally uncertain. It's been buoyed by its codependent relationship with Donald Trump and nearly sunk by peddling his election lies.

It's been outflanked to the right by insurgent TV news challengers. And it's now imperiled by a Murdoch family succession drama that recently spilled into public view. What is clear, almost three decades into the country's Fox News era, is that Fox's fate and America's are bound together. This series is about how that happened and how it almost didn't.

Caroline Bruner came to New York in the mid-1990s with dreams of becoming a star. I wanted to be an actor. I'd had an internship at a soap opera, at Guiding Light, and I thought that was fab.

Acting felt totally thrilling, but also risky and unreliable. So Caroline quickly changed course and set her sights on a different career. Television news kind of gave me the same sort of buzz that I felt when I would go on stage. There was action and there was things happening and it was interesting and it was challenging. Caroline got a job at NBC News and loved it. But when that role ended, she couldn't find anything else. She was desperate to get back into the industry somewhere.

At her college reunion, she spotted a woman who she knew worked in TV news. Caroline approached her colds and basically begged for help. And she said, how resourceful are you? And I said, I can be very resourceful. She's like, find me a bottle of bourbon and a pack of cigarettes, menthols, within 15 minutes, and we'll talk. Hard liquor, smoking, a nearly impossible deadline. It was like she was working in TV news already. And Caroline nailed the assignment.

After she handed over the bourbon and the menthols, she got a personal referral to Fox News. In 1999, she landed a job as a Fox production assistant in the Washington, D.C. Bureau. When you're dealing with something like NBC and that behemoth, it was a lot harder to get the ship to change course. Whereas Fox, if something wasn't working, they would change it immediately. I do better when things are not like set in stone operationally.

and you're kind of creating things as you go. Jim Mills was working at C-SPAN when he heard that a new thing called Fox News Channel was staffing up in Washington, D.C. It was going to be young and swashbuckling, not bound by the stale conventions of classic TV news. It's going to be kick-ass, and I want to be part of it. I needed to be the guy they hired for Capitol Hill.

Jim spent his days chatting up politicians and staffers, scouring the Capitol building for tidbits to pass along to Fox's on-camera reporters.

He was also a Fox News evangelist, telling everyone on the Hill what the channel was and what it wasn't. It took forever to get people to notice that we were a separate network than Homer Simpson. I had to go around and go into offices, physically turning their TVs to channel 18 so they could see that we have a whole network here. He was always up on the Hill. Occasionally, it was very exciting when he walked into the Bureau. It was like, Jim Mills is here!

Anne McGann worked in D.C. too. She'd started out at ABC News, but quickly found herself stuck with no room for advancement. Then, a couple of her mentors, including Cokie Roberts, suggested she look at Fox. See what this whole cable thing's about. And then the line was, and when they fail, when they close down, come back to ABC.

Whether or not Fox News crashed and burned, and would have a lot of opportunities, unlike its broadcast competitors, Fox was non-union, which meant there were basically no restrictions on which people could do what jobs.

As a newbie in Fox's DC bureau, Anne worked long hours learning how to edit tape and work with satellite feeds. With non-union, I was great cheap labor. But when you're in your 20s and it's a startup and it's fun and you are learning, you can rationalize the low pay.

Anne, Jim, and Caroline were the workhorses for Fox's daytime and early evening programming blocks. They worked exclusively on hard news, and none of them saw their work through an ideological lens.

While Fox News Channel was founded by well-known conservatives, Ann didn't see that kind of partisan lean in the newsroom. Within the Washington Bureau, there were so many more Democrats working, at least behind the scenes, than non-Democrats. Ann and Jim both told me they were middle of the road politically back then. Caroline tilted more to the left. In D.C., she worked alongside one of Fox's highest-profile conservative journalists.

So he's like, you absolutely remake that graphic. You make her look as good as she can. It's not your job to make her look bad.

To be clear, this was happening on the news side of Fox News. The primetime opinion shows were a totally separate operation with a very different approach.

While Brit Hume insisted on being impartial towards Hillary Clinton, conservative host Sean Hannity aired conspiracy theories about her connection to a White House staffer who died by suicide. In the article, you talk about affairs of not only the president, but of Hillary Clinton with Vince Foster, at least David... We were the newsgatherers. Those shows were the opinion page. And they got a little bat-s*** crazy sometimes. The bat-s*** crazy stuff was easy for Jim to ignore.

He was busy on Capitol Hill doing actual journalism. And as the political calendar flipped to 2000, he felt like Fox and its campaign reporters were holding their own. We just did kick-ass coverage of the 2000 election, Carl Cameron and Jim Angle. I mean, they were doing some great work. Carl, what feeling do you get from the Bush campaign? Is this a feeling of confidence, anxiety? Well, it's funny, actually. The Texas governor today said, you don't like to feel confident in this business.

And that's the only sort of moment of self-deprecating humility that we've heard in a while. This is a very cocky campaign. We had some great reporters out there doing what I was doing, which was being first, being scrappy, being competitive. Here we are sitting next to the other guys, ABC, CBS, CNN, CNN.

It just felt like we belong. And Jim and Caroline all say that Fox's politics didn't affect their day-to-day work. They had free reign to look into whatever stories they wanted without the layers of bureaucracy that weighed down other networks. At least, that's what they thought. But just days before the presidential election, Fox's journalistic values would get put to the test. A long-buried secret from a candidate's past threatened to leak out.

It was a story that could prove Fox News' neutrality or demonstrate that at Fox, editorial independence was just a mirage. And the guy who instigated everything was a Democrat from Maine who called a Republican from Texas a big wiener.

— My name is Tom Connolly, and I'm an attorney. — Tom was active in the main Democratic Party and a delegate to the 2000 Democratic National Convention. He was always looking for a chance to speak out against the death penalty and Reaganomics. So when the fiscally conservative, capital punishment endorsing George W. Bush started campaigning for president, Tom had to give him a piece of his mind.

One of the first stops was in Maine, so I went over to protest it. Tom found a spot in the crowd and waited for his moment. So he comes out and turns around the big limo, and he's got the window down, and there he is. I see him. And so I yell, you big wiener. And he yelled back at me, who you calling wiener boy, is what he said, and he drove away.

That Wiener Boy incident kicked off a grassroots anti-Bush campaign. Tom launched a Wiener Boy website and made W is for Wiener buttons that featured a drawing of Bush stuffed inside a hot dog bun. Despite Tom's best efforts, the whole Wiener thing didn't really catch on.

Bush got the Republican nomination. And as the election drew closer, he had even odds to win the presidency. The Bush and Gore campaigns don't agree on much, but tonight they do agree on this. The race goes to the wire. But Tom was about to learn something with the potential to throw the election into chaos.

On the afternoon of Thursday, November 2nd, he was in court defending a client when a friend approached him with some information. Did you know George Bush had a drunk driving charge here in Maine? I said, no. He said, yeah. I said, no. He said, yeah. I said, really? He said, yeah. Even though his friend said, yeah, at least three times,

Tom wanted to confirm it for himself. So he called up the clerk of court in Biddeford, an old mill town not far from the Bush family's summer estate in Kennebunkport, Maine. So I said, can you check for a closed file? And she said, okay, sure, sure, Tom. And I said, yeah, George Bush. She says, I know that. Like, she was waiting for this call, you know.

The clerk faxed Tom what she had, a document from 1976 showing that George W. Bush had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for operating a vehicle under the influence and paid a small fine. Although Bush's hard-drinking past wasn't a secret, he'd never revealed this arrest publicly.

And now, this powerful, potentially election-changing intel had fallen into the hands of the W is for Wiener guy. And I thought, why hasn't this come out? And so I'm telling anybody that would listen, hey, did you know? Did you know? One of the people who listened was a local TV reporter who happened to be hanging around the courthouse.

That afternoon, Tom told her what he knew. And then he waited for the fallout. At 6 o'clock that night, I just watched local news. And I remember thinking, ha, it's not even on there. What Tom didn't know is that his story was now in the hands of a national news network. Fox News Channel. We report, you decide. Coming up, the fairness ideal of the early Fox News network was about to be put to the test. This is On The Media.

On the Media is supported by BetterHelp. Halloween is the season when we start to see people wearing masks and costumes, but sometimes it can feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to, like at our jobs, at work, or around our friends and family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself so you can take off the mask, because masks should be used for Halloween celebrations, not for our emotions.

If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule.

Therapy can arm you with the tools you need to live your best life, helping you learn things like positive coping mechanisms and setting effective boundaries. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Visit BetterHelp.com slash OTM today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash OTM.

Did you know Radiolab has a new podcast for kids? Well, now you do. It's called Terrestrials, and it's hosted by me, Lulu Miller. On every episode, we take a walk into nature to meet a plant or animal behaving in ways that will stun you. Squirrels who hide secrets in their brain that might help us get to Mars. Bugs that make milk, and oh yeah, we occasionally sing about it. Search for Radiolab for Kids wherever you listen to podcasts and get the newest episodes of Terrestrials today.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Olinger. We're listening to episode one of the newest season of Slow Burn about the rise of Fox News. Just before the break, we heard how Democratic activist Tom Connolly was disappointed that a potentially damaging piece of information about Bush hadn't gotten traction on the local news.

Connolly had no idea that the story was about to blow up. Fox News Channel learned about George W. Bush's drunk driving conviction mostly by dumb luck. On November 2nd, 2000, a reporter for a local Fox station got a tip from Tom Connolly about Bush's DUI.

Her station then got in touch with its corporate sibling, Fox News, and asked for help confirming the story. The internal conversation, it was a healthy debate, as it should be in any newsroom, about does this matter? Is this fair? Anne McGinn worked on the team that coordinated special coverage for Fox News. Primaries, political conventions, and in just five days, election night.

She knew that revealing Bush's drunk driving arrest could have massive ramifications if Fox chose to report it. Are we going into gossipy territory? Is it relevant? Is it sensational?

concerned me slightly. Maybe more than slightly. — Ann was a respected producer, but way too junior to have any real say. This decision came quickly, from the very top, from Roger Ailes. Fox was going with the story. — Fox News has learned that in 1976, Governor Bush was arrested in Maine and charged with driving under the influence of liquor. The date of the charge, October 15th, 1976. — Fox's reporter inside the Bush campaign, Carl Cameron, broke the news.

CNN, MSNBC, and all the broadcast networks scrambled to catch up. And everyone had the same question: Had Fox News Channel just sunk the Republican presidential candidate? There's never been a bigger surprise this late in the game. This whole episode has added a dose of uncertainty to the Bush campaign at the worst possible moment. The question tonight is whether Bush's decision to keep his arrest from the public will hurt him politically. Hang on a second.

George W. Bush spoke for himself later that evening and told a gaggle of journalists that everything Fox had reported was true. I oftentimes said that years ago I made some mistakes. I occasionally drank too much, and I did on that night. And I regret that it happened, but it did. I've learned my lesson. Bush sounded vulnerable. His presidential ambitions possibly thwarted by the network everyone had assumed would be his biggest ally.

But he didn't just apologize for his mistakes. He also wondered about the motives of whoever had peddled this scoop. I think that's an interesting question, why now, four days before an election. I got my suspicions. Thank you all. I've got my suspicions. Bush was basically giving the national media an assignment. Figure out where the DUI story came from. It didn't take long to find an answer.

Thomas Connolly, a flamboyant Portland lawyer and active Democrat. He now operates an outlandish anti-Bush website called W is for Wiener. When Fox News first reported the DUI, the focus was on Bush's drinking and whether he'd hidden his arrest from voters. Now that Tom had been identified as the source, producer Anne McGann watched that focus shift. You saw Fox's coverage change a bit. It was softening.

24 hours after he broke the news of Bush's arrest, Fox's Carl Cameron reported another story. This one focused almost entirely on Tom and his Democratic Party ties. Cameron was squarely on the news side of Fox News, not an opinion slinger like Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity. But now, he was suggesting that the DUI story very well could have been a Democratic plot, and that Tom Connolly had been part of the plotting.

Is it fair to call it a, what you did, a political dirty trick? Not at all. Dirty trick telling the truth, no. A dirty trick is if I sat on it and knew about it in August or something and then snuck it out at the last minute. Maybe that's a dirty trick. Maybe it's not. It's called the truth.

As Tom drew more scrutiny, George W. Bush did an exclusive sit-down with Carl Cameron and essentially thanked him and Fox for looking into where the DUI story came from. I understand through your reporting and others that a Democrat official has in Maine put this information out.

A couple of hours later, Bill O'Reilly told his viewers that it was now clear that Fox News had no partisan agenda. That the channel's reporting on George W. Bush's arrest proved that. What he didn't say is that Fox then helped Bush by deflating its own scoop. So why did Fox change course? O'Reilly offered one possible answer:

He said that he'd gotten more than 5,000 letters about the DUI story, many of them from viewers who were angry that Fox News had put Bush in a negative light. Fox's most loyal audience members didn't want journalistic neutrality. They wanted their candidate to win.

Anne McGinn hadn't been at Fox News for the network's first presidential election, the one with Beethoven the slobbering St. Bernard and Mike Schneider ripping the phone off the wall. By the time she got to Fox, that early catastrophe had become a part of workplace lore. Folks who were there in 96, you could see that they just wanted to put their head in their hand, kind of like, wow, that was so bad.

On November 7th, 2000, Ann would be one of the producers in Fox's New York control room, and she felt certain that this time, there wouldn't be any kind of debacle. It was just like, okay, look how far we've come. We actually know what we're doing now. There was a confidence I felt in 2000. Fox's election special would be hosted by the network's two-star anchors. Count on Great Hume and Paula Zahn for continuing election night coverage that's clear and concise on America's number one network for political coverage.

Sean Hannity's primetime opinion show would get preempted on election night. But that afternoon, Anne and her boss saw the conservative host coming out of his office. Anne says that as they passed each other, Hannity made a prediction about the presidential race. I think our guys got this. And I had a physical reaction. My head snapped back. And I thought, our guy? Who's our guy? We have no guy. But I knew exactly who Sean Hannity was referring to.

And I thought it was very presumptuous that he was assuming that we all had the same guy. A Fox News spokesperson says Sean Hannity has no recollection of this. But no matter which candidate Hannity or the rest of Fox preferred, election night would come down to how America voted. As the country decides, we'll bring you up-to-the-minute results with a special eye on the exit polls and the crucial electoral vote count.

The broadcast networks, CNN and Fox News, all relied on the same source for their state-by-state vote totals, a group called Voter News Service. While all the channels had the same data, they still made their own calls, relying on in-house decision teams to crunch the numbers and project which candidate had won. These decision desks were typically kept separate from the rest of the newsroom to avoid outside influence, and they were seen as basically infallible.

If we say somebody's carried a state, you can pretty much take it to the bank, book it, if that's true. The Fox control room only heard from the decision team through an intermediary, who gave Ann's boss a heads up whenever a call got made. Results are in. This is what it is. Fox News projects...

At Fox, those projections would trigger an on-screen graphic and sound effect. The whiz-bang. New Hampshire. Roll the whiz-bang. Delaware. Oh, I love the whiz-bang. It would whiz it and, like, do a turn, and then there was, like, a star effect at the bottom to make it look very pretty and official and patriotic. That was great.

The night's first consequential whiz-bang came around 7:50 p.m. Eastern Time. We've just been able to make a call in the state of Florida, and Fox News projects that Al Gore will carry the state of Florida... Fox News wasn't going out on a limb there. They made their call after CBS, CNN, and NBC. He wins the 25 electoral votes. It turns out that Governor Jeb Bush was not his brother's keeper. After all those announcements, "Gore wins Florida" felt like a settled fact.

And it seemed like the election could be trending his way. But then, two hours later, everything got unsettled. Florida is now too close to call. What the networks give us, the networks take it away. Computer and data problem. One of the CBS News election night headlines of the hour. The numbers from voter news service had been off. And the network decision teams weren't so infallible after all.

By this point, it was clear that whoever really won Florida was going to win the White House. And Fox's Brit Hume sounded totally uncertain about when the night might end. Decision desks all over the place are looking at this, scratching their heads, and unable to call this race. As Tuesday night turned to Wednesday morning, it felt like nothing was going to break the deadlock.

But at 2.16 a.m. Eastern, the whiz-bang banged again. Fox News now projects George W. Bush the winner in Florida, and thus it appears the winner of the presidency of the United States. This time, Fox was taking the lead, projecting Florida for Bush before any of the other networks.

And Brit Hume didn't sound totally convinced. I must tell you, everybody, after all this all night long, I feel a little bit apprehensive about the whole thing. I have no reason to doubt our decision desk, but there it is. At Bush headquarters in Austin, Texas, the candidate's chief strategist, Karl Rove, was feeling wary, too. When that call came across the screen, Rove said, it's just Fox.

But it wouldn't be just Fox for long. Within minutes, everyone in TV news made the exact same call. Uh-oh, something's happened. George Bush is the president-elect of the United States. Florida goes Bush. The presidency is Bush. That's it. Unless there is a terrible calamity, George W. Bush, by our projections, is going to be the next president of the United States.

The Bush victory party in Austin was ecstatic about their candidate's projected win and the network that called it first. At Gore headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, it wouldn't stop raining. And the Democratic nominee was certain it was all over. Gore had to call and concede. Jenny Backus was the communications director for the Democratic National Committee.

On election night, she was in the Gore campaign's war room. Gore was going to go give his speech, which was probably like five minutes away. And that's just when all chaos broke loose. A Florida secretary of state says the margin in Florida, get this folks, 629 votes.

When Fox had called Florida for Bush, his lead was in the tens of thousands. Now, with the margin shrinking down to almost nothing, it felt absurd for Gore to give up on the presidency. And I'm like, can I call the networks? Can I call the networks? Jenny got the go-ahead and told one of her network contacts that Gore was taking back his concession. And she said, are you f***ing sure? And I said, I'm f***ing sure, and I gotta go.

Vice President Al Gore has called Governor Bush and retracted his concession because he is now of a mind that things could be turning yet again in Florida. The truth is, no one should have called Florida for George W. Bush. The margin was just too narrow, and the chances of a data error were just too high. The Associated Press understood that and decided that they couldn't make a projection.

But Fox News and its television rivals all screwed up. Twice. Fox's second retraction came after CBS, ABC, and NBC had already pulled back their calls. It was around 4 a.m. as Gore's campaign chairman called out Fox and everyone else for giving the race to Bush. It now appears that their call was premature. Yeah!

— Is now returning the state of Florida to the "too close to call" column in light of developments there. — It would take a recount and a whole slew of bitter legal fights before a real winner could be declared. The whiplash on election night had sowed chaos, anger, and confusion. There was plenty of blame to go around.

To Voter News Service, whose data had helped lead the TV networks astray. To the networks themselves, for caring more about being first than being right.

and to Fox News in particular, for leading the way and declaring that Bush had won. But it mattered that Fox News was the first network that called not only Florida for Bush, but the country for Bush. And it has shaped the way we perceive things is sort of like, you know, Bush was the presumed president and Gore's trying to snatch something away. A lot of people wanted to know how Fox News had made such an important decision, one that had created the impression that the election was over.

Soon, they'd all be focusing on the man who ran the Fox decision team. His name was John Ellis, and he was George W. Bush's first cousin. Coming up, how did a Bush family insider come to be in such an influential position on election night? This is On The Media.

Only 116 people in all of history can say what it's like to be a Supreme Court justice. On the next Notes from America, we will meet one. I'm Kai Wright. Join me for a conversation with Associate Justice Kataji Brown Jackson, the first ever black woman to serve on the court. We'll talk about the generation of civil rights fighters who raised her, what SCOTUS means in this moment, and her passions, not only for the law, but for Broadway. That's next time. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. We're listening to episode one of the newest series of Slow Burn about the rise of Fox News.

Even though Fox News executives had claimed at the outset that the network would be, quote, fair and balanced, from the very beginning it was clear that some hosts, like Sean Hannity, were not following the script. And then on election eve 2000, it turned out that the man who called Florida for George W. Bush was none other than the president's first cousin, John Ellis.

Here's Josh Levine. John Prescott Ellis grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the grandson of a U.S. senator. He roomed with a Kennedy at the private Milton Academy, then moved on to Yale. After college, he got a job at NBC as a producer in their election unit. But he stepped down in 1989 after his uncle, George Herbert Walker Bush, got elected president to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Ellis' relationship with Fox News began after the channel's first election fiasco, the one in 1996. Here's Ellis in an interview with C-SPAN. They had what Roger Ailes felt was not a very good night. So he asked me to come in and sort of do the decision desk team to professionalize the operation there. Ellis ran the decision team during the 1998 midterms and the 2000 primaries, but his work didn't draw much scrutiny.

Fox producer Anne McGinn remembers hearing something about his family connections, but it didn't seem like a huge problem. He was related in some way to the Bush family. But then hearing that he is qualified in his own right felt like, OK, we'll give the benefit of the doubt. And what kind of effect could that have on an election anyway? No one had expected the 2000 election to come down to a couple hundred votes or that Fox's call in Florida would be so pivotal.

But even so, the makeup of the Fox News decision desk wasn't getting much attention. Until six days after the election, when John Ellis spoke with a reporter. Here's Ellis in a 2023 podcast. I did an interview with what I thought was a friend of mine from The New Yorker. That came out and there was a lot of drama because I'm related to the Bush family.

That New Yorker piece was written by Jane Mayer. In it, Ellis seemed excited to relive his election-calling adventures. How the afternoon exit polls had looked so bleak for Bush that he'd pantomimed a neck slash in Roger Ailes' office. How he'd watched the numbers in Florida flip in Bush's favor. How it was so cool to be on the phone that night with his two cousins, the governor and the president-elect.

It was a short article, less than 700 words. But when it got published, the whole world knew where John Ellis worked and who was in his family tree. It does not look good for Fox News. I mean, that's just the truth. I watched Fox all night, and I think it was misinformation for us to be told things. And it turns out that your analyst there was the cousin of George Bush. It makes me very, very concerned.

Before Election Day, and even for a few days after, almost no one knew or cared that Bush's cousin was running the Fox News decision team. Now, the whole thing seemed totally bizarre and scandalous. Like if the home plate umpire in a World Series game was cousins with one of the starting pitchers.

Slate's then-editor Michael Kinsley thought it was all pretty rich. If it had been a cousin of Al Gore sitting there making this call, Republicans would be burning up the phone lines and spreading all sorts of conspiracy theories. The person who made the strongest case against John Ellis was John Ellis.

Along with his decision desk work, Ellis had a regular column in the Boston Globe. In 1999, he told his readers that he wouldn't write about the upcoming presidential race. He said, There is no way for you to know if I am telling you the truth about George W. Bush's presidential campaign, because in his case, my loyalty goes to him and not to you.

He's too biased to write an opinion column, but he's somehow hireable to make some of the most important news decisions at the Fox News Channel. I don't see how that quite works out. After The New Yorker published its story about Ellis, Fox pleaded ignorance about his election night phone calls. One of Fox's editorial leaders, John Moody, said he hadn't known that the guy running the channel's decision desk had been chatting up his cousins.

In an internal memo, Moody wrote that Ellis' status was under review. Meanwhile, Fox totally absolved itself of wrongdoing. John Moody said it would have been as strange not to hire Ellis because of who he is related to as to hire him because of his relatives. Finally, Fox explained that the head of its decision desk wasn't really the one in charge.

that John Moody, not John Ellis, had given the ultimate sign-off on the Florida call. This was sort of one of the earliest instances of night being day, dealing with Fox at times. David Fokkenflik is now a media correspondent for NPR. But in 2000, he was on that beat for the Baltimore Sun. Back then, David heard all of Fox's span about John Ellis' role on election night.

But he also knew that they were scrambling behind the scenes to rewrite the Ellis narrative. It just so happened that the Baltimore Sun had assigned a freelancer to embed with the Fox News decision team on election night. Now, Fox PR wanted David to command that reporter to say publicly that John Ellis had not been calling the shots. He wasn't saying, "I need a favor." He said, "This is what's going to happen." That Baltimore Sun freelancer had left early on election night and hadn't gotten much information.

But she had passed along one important thing. John Ellis had told her directly that he was the one making the calls for Fox News. That's what David said to Fox PR. And Fox PR didn't want to hear it. This was met with a fiery blast. You know, you're trying to f*** us over. And the answer is, no, I'm telling you, this is what she observed. This was, for years, a reference point and a grievance point with Fox every time I did some reporting they didn't like.

But even if John Ellis did make the Florida call personally, there was still a big unanswered question. Had he intentionally cooked the books for his first cousin? Ellis declined to talk to us for this podcast. But over the last 24 years, he's said emphatically that he didn't do anything nefarious. It's hard to imagine how preposterous conspiracy theories are until you find yourself at the center of one.

In December 2000, Ellis wrote his own blow-by-blow account of election night. In that article, he said that Fox's decision to call Florida for Bush was totally empirical, that based on the vote counts, Al Gore simply could not overcome the math. But another member of the Fox decision team later said that Ellis wasn't looking at the numbers when he made the call. She said he was actually on the phone with his cousin Jeb, the governor of Florida.

And according to her, when Ellis hung up, he announced to the rest of the team, Jebby says we got it. Jebby says we got it. But Fox News wasn't the only network to call Florida for Bush. Just the first. So was Fox really responsible for everyone else falling in line? Ellis said this in 2023. I never realized I had the power to make CBS call for Bush and make NBC call for Bush.

Ellis didn't have the power to make CBS do anything. When Fox made its call at 2.16 a.m., the leader of the combined CBS and CNN decision desks declined to follow suit, saying, Fox has an agenda. Don't forget. But NBC made a different decision. When the head of that decision desk heard about Fox's projection, he immediately hung up a phone call, saying, Sorry, gotta go. Fox just called it.

NBC would declare Bush the president-elect a minute and a half after Fox did. Just 22 seconds after that, CBS and CNN called it too.

The networks clearly felt competitive pressure instigated by Fox News' call. Maybe if Fox didn't call the race first, nobody would have jumped the gun, and we could have lived in a world where neither candidate was the presumed president-elect. Other networks were definitely influenced by the fact that someone had gone first and said, in this fraught moment, George W. Bush will be the next president of the United States.

What you hear in journalism all the time is, you want to be first, but it's more important to be right. What you see all the time is, you want to be first, and yes, we'd like to be right. So why was John Ellis running the Fox News decision team during the 2000 election? I think Fox was sending two different signals. The first was to a potential Republican administration, showing that the network would be full of friendly faces.

The second signal went out to Fox's media peers. It was a kind of a wink at the rest of the establishment press, saying, "We can create our own counter-establishment, and by the way, if you guys are going to get all pious about it, screw you." It's them saying, "Hey, we don't have to live by your rules. You know, we write our own rules." Fox's rule-breaking did inspire a bunch of piousness about ethics and morals and all that high-and-mighty journalism kind of stuff.

Congress also took an interest in how Fox and everyone else in TV news bungled the election. In his testimony in Washington, D.C. in 2001, Roger Ailes actually said he was sorry. Our lengthy and critical self-examination shows that we let our viewers down. I apologize for making those bad projections that night. It will not happen again. Ailes may have apologized, but he wasn't admitting that Fox did anything wrong.

He said that those bad projections were caused by bad numbers from voter news service. In his written testimony, Ailes added that John Ellis was a consummate professional, and he said that Ellis' frequent phone calls to his cousins on election night were nothing more than a good journalist talking to his very high-level sources. Or, to put it another way, screw you.

Ellis would ultimately resign his position, leading the Fox News decision desk. But the role he played in the 2000 election loomed large for Fox's critics, including The Daily Show's Jon Stewart. This debacle has forced network higher-ups to change their slogan from "We report, you decide" to "We report, you can suck it." That was sort of the beginning of the Democratic axiom that Fox News is the axis of all evil.

Democratic spokesperson Jenny Backus says the 2000 election and the recount that followed made her see the world differently. She believed that Fox News was a destructive influence on American life. She was also jealous of its power and reach. The Republicans had a motor in their motorboat that was a cable news station that was taking their talking points and pushing it out or approaching the news of the day from that perspective. We didn't have that. I started wising up during the recount.

Fox News producer Anne McGinn had been scandalized when she heard Sean Hannity say that George W. Bush was our guy. Now, she started picking up that vibe everywhere at Fox. It became much more apparent how the organization felt. I just was left with this constant feeling of...

People really hope that this is going to go towards Bush. A special edition of the O'Reilly Factor is on tonight. It looks like George W. Bush has it. On election night, Fox News called Florida 90 seconds before anyone else.

Once the legal wrangling started, Bill O'Reilly declared that Bush had won more than two weeks before the Supreme Court ruled in his favor. This whole thing in Florida was about hustle and calculation on the part of Al Gore's team. They brilliantly executed a plan that almost gave the vice president the win. During the Florida recount, Fox News' audience grew 440% to an average of more than a million daily viewers.

When the numbers settled back down, Fox's audience was still bigger than MSNBC's, basically permanently. And it was closing in on CNN.

Fox News now had a loyal army of fans. And when they called in to Fox's weekend media criticism show, they expressed their gratitude for what they were seeing and hearing. You're the only ones who give a fair and balanced news of the election. I did choose Fox after channel surfing because I felt that they were touching the closest to the truth. I really can only stand to turn on Fox News to hear the coverage because it seems to be the only network that reports it in a fair manner.

We would get messages from people saying, "We've burnt the Fox News icon into our TV screens because we have it on all day." So when you turn off the TV, you'd still see Fox News burned into the glass. That was a turning point for me, realizing that things were a bit different. The Fox News bug, the logo, it started moving because otherwise it was burning into screens.

That Fox News logo started spinning in the summer of 2001, a few months into the Bush presidency, and less than five years after the channel got off the ground. At that point, Anne and Caroline and a bunch more of the Fox staffers we spoke with said they still believed in each other, but they knew that Fox News was becoming a different place, that a whole big universe of Americans believed in Fox in a different way than they did.

I would travel around and I would tell people, they'd ask, what do you do? I work for Fox News. Capitol Hill producer Jim Mills. And they said, oh man, Fox. I love Fox. That's all I watch. And I would say to them, don't do that to your brain. Coming up this season on Slow Burn...

I said to Roger, the last thing you are fair and balanced. That should have been my slogan. It was like, oh, I'm living in a Vanity Fair article. Oh, my God. This is insanity. He writes it in his book. He tries to make me out. No, no, no, no, no, no. Shut up. You had your 35 minutes. Shut up.

And next time, before Fox News, Roger Ailes launched another cable network, a channel that was apolitical and strange, and that he believed would be a huge success. Roger would stand on a soapbox in the middle of the newsroom. He's giving us our marching orders, and we want to do it right for this guy. ♪

This season of Slow Burn was written and reported by Josh Levine. The Slow Burn team includes Lizzie Jacobs, Sophie Summergrad, Joel Meyer, Rosie Belson, Patrick Fort, Jacob Fenston, Julia Russo, Derek John, Susan Matthews, Hilary Fry, Merritt Jacob, and Joe Plorg. You can listen to the rest of the series at slate.com slash slow burn or wherever you get your podcasts.

On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. We'll be back with an all-new episode of OTM next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ewinger.