Micah Loewinger: Hey, this is Micah Loewinger, and you're listening to the on the media midweek podcast. When Fox News launched in 1996, critics called it, "disorganized, incompetent, and laughably inept." During that election cycle, it barely registered. Everything changed in 2000, when Fox News called Florida and the presidency for George W. Bush before any of the other networks, potentially altering the outcome of the election in Bush's favorite.

The new series of Slow Burn from Slate takes that pivotal moment as its starting point to examine the place that Fox News has since carved out in our culture. The series traces the channel's surging popularity in those early years and profiles a bunch of people who rose up to try to stop it. For this week's podcast extra, we have that very first episode of Slow Burn for you. Here's the host of the series, Josh Levin.

Josh Levin: 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. There was only one problem. Even his biggest fans had no clue he was still on TV.

Mike Schneider: What they would say to me is, where you been? [chuckles]

Josh Levin: 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.

Mike Schneider: Be honest, be fair, don't be boring, but don't hype anything up. Just go tell the story.

Josh Levin: It also didn't hurt that he looked the part.

Mike Schneider: I had a face where grandmas thought that their daughters might be interested in seeing young Mr. Schneider.

Josh Levin: 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.

Anchor: Our news sources, your source for news, Fox News Channel.

Mike Schneider: Roger came to me and he said, listen, I would like you to anchor our newscast of record every evening.

Josh Levin: Roger was Roger Ailes, the chairman and CEO of the brand new Fox News channel, and he wanted Mike front and center.

Mike Schneider: I want to know why. Maybe part of it's ego. I'm looking for a compliment. I don't know. He said, "Because you're one of the best anchors in the country, and because you have a reputation for fairness."

Josh Levin: Mike knew that Ailes had a reputation for pushing his conservative views, but that fairness line hit his ear just right.

Mike Schneider: If they really wanted to do this and they really wanted to do it right, I felt, okay, let's see where they want to take this thing. Then we're off to the races.

Announcer: The way you want it, when you want it, The Schneider Report, weeknights, Fox News Channel.

Josh Levin: 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.

Mike Schneider: "We used to watch you on ABC or NBC. Where you been? What are you doing?" I'd say on the Fox News Channel. "Where can I see it?" You can't.

Josh Levin: On November 5th, 1996, everything was supposed to change.

Mike Schneider: On election night, we would be on the air with comprehensive coverage. A full traditional election night show.

Josh Levin: That election night, with Bob Dole challenging Bill Clinton, would be Fox News's 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.

Mike Schneider: The idea of me in the anchor chair that night, I was jazzed.

Interviewer: Then what actually happened on election night?

Mike Schneider: That was a shit show.

Josh Levin: 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 Crier 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.

Mike Schneider: 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. I said, "What are we doing next? What are we doing next? What are we doing next?" They, "I'll get back to you in a minute. Get back to you in a minute." I said, "Okay, if nobody's going to answer this phone, I guess we don't need the phone." I ripped the phone off the wall and I threw it across the studio. Made a point.

Josh Levin: 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.

Announcer: Tonight, Fox presents a special movie presentation--

Interviewer: Do you remember the movie that they showed?

Mike Schneider: Oh God, I don't know.

Announcer: This election day, America is going to the dogs.

Beethoven, with 200 pounds of shedding, drooling Beethoven.

Interviewer: Oh, the Charles Groden film. Holy shit.

Announcer: Put some bites into your election night on nonstop Fox.

Josh Levin: 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.

Mike Schneider: You could see that Mr. Clinton has now amassed 367 electoral votes, according to our count.

Josh Levin: 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.

Reporter: Viewership is dismal, and some analysts say that Rupert Murdoch has overreached again.

Josh Levin: 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. When the next big election came around in November 2000, Fox would captivate the nation and just maybe change the fate of American democracy.

Announcer: Who will be the next president? You decide in two days. Election Day coverage only on the Fox News Channel.

Josh Levin: This is Slow Burn, season 10, the rise of Fox News. I'm your host, Josh Levin. 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.

Over the next six episodes, I'm going to tell you about a crucial inflection point in the nation's history. The moment between 2000 and 2004 when Fox News first surged to power and a whole bunch of people rose up to try and stop it. First, in 2000, with one of the tightest presidential elections ever hanging in the balance, Fox News made a call that divided America, maybe forever.

Reporter: If there were any more surprises that could take place tonight, it seems impossible to imagine.

Josh Levin: This is episode one. We report. You can suck it. Caroline Bruner came to New York in the mid-1990s with dreams of becoming a star.

Caroline Bruner: I wanted to be an actor. I'd had an internship at a soap opera at Guiding Light, and I thought that was fab [chuckles].

Josh Levin: Acting felt totally thrilling, but also risky and unreliable. Caroline quickly changed course and set her sights on a different career.

Caroline Bruner: Television news gave me the same 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.

Josh Levin: 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.

Caroline Bruner: She said, "How resourceful are you?" 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."

Josh Levin: Hard liquor. Smoking a nearly impossible deadline. It was like she was working in TV news already. 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, DC bureau.

Caroline Bruner: 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.

Jim Mills: I do better when things are not set in stone operationally, and you're creating things as you go.

Josh Levin: Jim Mills was working at C-SPAN when he heard that a new thing called Fox News Channel was staffing up in Washington, DC. It was going to be young and swashbuckling, not bound by the stale conventions of classic TV news.

Jim Mills: It's going to be kickass, and I want to be part of it. I needed to be the guy they hired for Capitol Hill.

Josh Levin: 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.

Jim Mills: 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.

Ann McGinn: 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."

Josh Levin: Ann McGinn worked in DC 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.

Ann McGinn: See what this whole cable thing's about. Then the line was, "and when they fail, when they close down, come back to ABC."

Josh Levin: 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, Ann worked long hours learning how to edit tape and work with satellite feeds.

Ann McGinn: 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.

Josh Levin: 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, Anne didn't see that partisan lean in the newsroom.

Ann McGinn: Within the Washington Bureau, there were so many more Democrats working at least behind the scenes than non-Democrats.

Josh Levin: Anne and Jim both told me they were middle of the road politically back then. Caroline tilted more to the left. In DC, she worked alongside one of Fox's highest-profile conservative journalists, Brit Hume, the anchor of the nightly newscast Special Report. Not long after Caroline started, she heard him demand that Fox be more fair to Hillary Clinton. During Clinton's 2000 Senate race, someone had sent along an unflattering photo of her to use in an on-air graphic.

Caroline Bruner: He's like, "You absolutely remake that graphic. You make her look as good as she can. It is not your job to make her look bad."

Josh Levin: 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.

Announcer: In the article, you talk about affairs of not only the president, but of Hillary Clinton with Vince Foster at least --

Jim Mills: We were the news gatherers. Those shows were the opinion page and they got a little batshit crazy sometimes.

Josh Levin: The batshit crazy stuff was easy for Jim to ignore. He was busy on Capitol Hill doing actual journalism. As the political calendar flipped to 2000, he felt like Fox and its campaign reporters were holding their own.

Jim Mills: We just did kickass coverage of the 2000 election. Carl Cameron and Jim Engle, they were doing some great work.

Interviewer: Carl, what feeling do you get from the Bush campaign is this feeling of confidence anxiety?

Carl Cameron: Well, it's funny actually. The Texas governor today said you don't like to feel confident in this business. That's the only moment of self-deprecating humility that we've heard in a while. This is a very cocky campaign.

Jim Mills: We had some great reporters out there doing what I was doing, which was being first, being scrappy, being competitive.

Ann McGinn: Here we are sitting next to the other guys, ABC, CBS, CNN. It just felt like we belong.

Josh Levin: Anne, 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.

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. The guy who instigated everything was a Democrat from Maine who called a Republican from Texas a big wiener.

Tom Connolly: My name is Tom Connolly and I'm an attorney. I've been practicing now for 42 years.

Josh Levin: Tom Connolly is a defense lawyer and his clients are usually in desperate straits.

Tom Connolly: Severe, severe mental illness and severe violence. Real hard cases. Whoa.

Josh Levin: Tom was active in the Maine 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. When the fiscally conservative capital punishment endorsing George W. Bush started campaigning for president, Tom had to give him a piece of his mind.

Tom Connolly: One of the first stops was in Maine, so I went over to protest it.

Josh Levin: Tom found a spot in the crowd and waited for his moment.

Tom Connolly: 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." He yelled back at me, "Who are you calling Weiner, boy?" is what he said, and he drove away.

Josh Levin: That wiener boy incident kicked off a grassroots anti-Bush campaign. Tom launched a wiener boy website and made W is for Weiner buttons that featured a drawing of Bush stuffed inside a hotdog bun. Despite Tom's best efforts, the whole Weiner 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.

Announcer: The Bush and Gore campaigns don't agree on much, but tonight they do agree on this. The race goes to the wire.

Josh Levin: 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.

Tom Connolly: "Did you know George Bush had a drunk driving charge here in Maine?" I said, "No." He said, "Yes." I said, "No." He said, "Yes." I said, "Really?" He said, "Yes."

Josh Levin: Even though his friend said yes at least three times, Tom wanted to confirm it for himself. 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.

Tom Connolly: I said, "Can you check for a closed file?" She said, "Okay, sure, sure, Tom."

Tom Connolly: I said, "George Bush." She says, "I know that," like she was waiting for this call.

Josh Levin: 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 had never revealed this arrest publicly. Now, this powerful, potentially election changing intel had fallen into the hands of the W is for Weiner guy.

Tom Connolly: I thought, why hasn't this come out? I'm telling anybody that would listen, "Hey, did you know? Did you know?"

Josh Levin: 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.

Tom Connolly: At 06:00 that night, I just watched local news, and I remember thinking, "Huh? It's not even on there."

Josh Levin: What Tom didn't know is that his story was now in the hands of a national news network.

Announcer: Fox News Channel. We report, you decide.

Josh Levin: 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.

Ann McGinn: The internal conversation was a healthy debate, as it should be in any newsroom about does this matter, is this fair?

Josh Levin: Anne McGahn 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.

Ann McGinn: Are we going into gossipy territory? Is it relevant? Is it sensational? It concerned me slightly. Maybe more than slightly.

Josh Levin: 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.

Carl Cameron: 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 15, 1976.

Josh Levin: Fox's reporter inside the Bush campaign, Carl Cameron, broke the news. CNN, MSNBC and all the broadcast networks scrambled to catch up. Everyone had the same. Had Fox News Channel just sunk the Republican presidential candidate?

Reporter: There's never been a bigger surprise this late in the game.

Reporter: This whole episode has added a dose of uncertainty, certainty to the Bush campaign at the worst possible moment.

Reporter: The question tonight is whether Bush's decision to keep his arrest from the public will hurt him politically. Hang on a second--

Josh Levin: George W. Bush spoke for himself later that evening and told a gaggle of journalists that everything Fox had reported was true.

George W. Bush: 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.

Josh Levin: Bush sounded vulnerable, his presidential ambitions possibly thwarted by the network everyone had assumed would be his biggest ally. He didn't just apologize for his mistakes. He also wondered about the motives of whoever had pedaled this scoop.

George W. Bush: 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.

Josh Levin: 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.

Reporter: Thomas Connolly, a flamboyant Portland lawyer and active Democrat, he now operates an outlandish anti-Bush website called W is for Wiener.

Josh Levin: 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 Ann McGahn watched that focus shift.

Ann McGinn: You saw Fox's coverage change a bit. It was softening.

Josh Levin: 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.

Interviewer: Is it fair to call it a what you did a political dirty trick?

Tom Connolly: 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.

Josh Levin: As Tom drew more scrutiny, George W. Bush did an exclusive sitdown with Carl Cameron and essentially thanked him and Fox for looking into where the DUI story came from.

George W. Bush: I understand through your reporting and others that a Democrat official has, in Maine, put this information out.

Josh Levin: 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 channels 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. 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.

Ann 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.

Ann McGinn: Folks who were there in '96, you could see that they just wanted to put their head in their hand, like, wow, that was so bad.

Josh Levin: 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 debacle.

Ann McGinn: 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.

Josh Levin: Fox's election special would be hosted by the network's two star anchors.

Announcer: Count on Brit Hume and Paul Lazan for continuing elections tonight coverage that's clear and concise on America's number one network for political coverage.

Josh Levin: Sean Hannity's primetime opinion show would get preempted on election night, but that afternoon, Ann and her boss saw the conservative host coming out of his office. Ann says that as they passed each other, Hannity made a prediction about the presidential race.

Ann McGinn: "I think our guy has got this." 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. I thought it was very presumptuous that he was assuming that we all had the same guy.

Josh Levin: 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.

Announcer: 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.

Josh Levin: 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.

Reporter: If we say somebody has carried a state, you can pretty much take it to the bank, book it if that's true.

Josh Levin: 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.

Ann McGinn: Results are a this is what it is. Fox News projects--

Josh Levin: At Fox, those projections would trigger an on -creen graphic and sound effect, the whiz bang.

Reporter: New Hampshire.

Ann McGinn: Roll the whiz bang.

Reporter: Delaware.

Ann McGinn: Oh, I love the whiz bang. It would whiz in and do a turn and then there was like a star effect at the bottom to make it look very pretty and official and patriotic.

Reporter: [chuckles] That was great.

Josh Levin: The night's first consequential whiz bang came around 07:50 p.m. Eastern Time.

Anchor: We've just been able to make a call on the state of Florida and Fox News projects that Al Gore will carry the state of Florida--

Josh Levin: Fox News wasn't going out on a limb there. They made their call after CBS, CNN, and NBC.

Anchor: He wins the 25 electoral votes. It turns out that Governor Jeb Bush was not his brother's keeper.

Josh Levin: 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.

Anchor: Florida is now too close to call.

What the networks give us, the networks taketh away.

Anchor: Computer and data problem, one of the CBS news election night headlines of the hour.

Josh Levin: 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. Fox's Brit Hume sounded totally uncertain about when the night might end.

Brit Hume: Decision desks all over the place are looking at this, scratching their heads and unable to call this race.

Josh Levin: As Tuesday night turned to Wednesday morning, it felt like nothing was going to break the deadlock, but at 216 am Eastern, the whiz bang banged again.

Anchor: Fox News now projects George W. Bush the winner in Florida and thus it appears, the winner of the presidency of the United States. Fox News projects--

Josh Levin: This time, Fox was taking the lead, projecting Florida for Bush before any of the other networks. Brit Hume didn't sound totally convinced.

Brit Hume: 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, but there it is.

Josh Levin: At Bush headquarters in Austin, Texas, the candidates 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.

Ann McGinn: Uh-oh, something's happened.

Anchor: George Bush is the president elect of the United States.

Anchor: Florida goes Bush. The presidency is Bush. That's it.

Anchor: Unless there is a terrible calamity, George W. Bush, by our projections, is going to be the next president of the United States.

Josh Levin: The Bush victory party in Austin was ecstatic about their candidate's projected win and the network that called it first. Fox anchor Paul Lazan wanted to make sure her channel got the credit it deserved.

Ann McGinn: All right, we're going to take some time out now for some shameless self-promotion. You want to know what these folks are waving at on the jumbo trail themselves? They are seeing themselves on the Fox News Channel feed. The way a lot of these folks found out that [crosstalk]--

Josh Levin: At Gore headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, it wouldn't stop raining and the Democratic nominee was certain it was all over.

Ann McGinn: Gore had to call and concede.

Josh Levin: Jenny Backus was the communications director for the Democratic National Committee. On election night, she was in the Gore campaign's war room.

Jenny Backus: Gore was going to go give his speech, which was probably like five minutes away. That's just when all chaos broke loose.

Anchor: A Florida secretary of state says the margin in Florida, get this, folks, 629 votes.

Josh Levin: 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.

Jenny Backus: I'm like, "Can I call the networks? Can I call the networks?"

Josh Levin: Jenny got the go ahead and told one of her network contacts that Gore was taking back his concession.

Jenny Backus: She said, "Are you fucking sure?" I said, "I'm fucking sure and I got to go."

Anchor: 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.

Josh Levin: 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 04:00 a.m. as Gore's campaign chairman called out Fox and everyone else for giving the race to Bush.

William Daley: It now appears that their call was premature.

[applause] Let me be--

Anchor: -is now returning the state of Florida to the too-close-to-call column in light of developments there.

Josh Levin: It would take a recount and a whole slew of bitter legal fates 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.

Reporter: It mattered that Fox News was the first network work that called not only Florida for Bush but the country for Bush. It has shaped the way we perceive things is like Bush was the presumed president and Gore is trying to snatch something away.

Josh Levin: 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.

Let's take a quick break. John Prescott Ellis grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the grandson of a US 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's 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.

John Ellis: They had what Roger Ailes felt was not a very good night. He asked me to come in and do the decision desk team to professionalize the operation there.

Josh Levin: Ellis ran the decision team during the 1998 midterms and the 2000 primaries, but his work didn't draw much scrutiny. Fox producer Ann McGinn remembers hearing something about his family connections, but it didn't seem like a huge problem.

Ann McGinn: He was related in some way to the Bush family, but then hearing that he is qualified in his own right felt like, ok, well give the benefit of the doubt. What effect could that have on an election anyway?

Josh Levin: 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. 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.

John Ellis: I did an interview with a person 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.

Josh Levin: 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.

Ann McGinn: It does not look good for Fox News. That's just the truth.

Voter: I watched Fox all night and it was misinformation for us to be told things. It turns out that your analyst there was the cousin of George Bush.

Voter: It makes me very, very concerned.

Josh Levin: 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.

Michael Kinsley: 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.

Josh Levin: 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."

Speaker: 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.

Josh Levin: 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. Seriously. That was their argument, that it would have been just as unethical not to employ George W. Bush's cousin. 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.

David Folkenflik: This was one of the earliest instances of night being day dealing with Fox at times.

Josh Levin: David Folkenflik 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 spin about John Ellis's role on election night, but he also knew that they were scrambling behind the scenes to rewrite the Ellis narrative.

David Folkenflik: I get these furious calls from a guy who worked for Fox.

Josh Levin: 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.

David Folkenflik: He wasn't saying, I need a favor. He said, this is what's going to happen.

Josh Levin: 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.

David Folkenflik: This was met with a fiery blast, you're trying to fuck us over. 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.

Josh Levin: 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 said emphatically that he didn't do anything nefarious.

John Ellis: It's hard to imagine how preposterous conspiracy theories are until you find yourself at the center of one.

Josh Levin: 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 impirical, 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.

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." Fox News wasn't the only network to call Florida for Bush. Just the first. Was Fox really responsible for everyone else falling in line? Ellis said this in 2023.

John Ellis: I never realized I had the power to make CBS call for Bush and make NBC call for Bush.

Josh Levin: Ellis didn't have the power to make CBS do anything. When Fox made its call at 02:16 a.m., the leader of the combined CBS and CNN decision desks declined to follow suit, saying Fox has an agenda, don't forget. 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, got to 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's 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.

David Folkenflik: 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. Yes, we'd like to be right.

Josh Levin: Here's where I come down. It was totally nuts for Fox News to put John Ellis in charge of its decision desk. It was also nuts for Ellis not to recuse himself and to be chatting it up with George and Jeb Bush all night, but I don't believe that Fox or Ellis had some secret plan to steal the presidency. 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.

David Folkenflik: It was a wink at the rest of the establishment press saying we can create our own counter-establishment. 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. We write our own rules.

Josh Levin: Fox's rule-breaking did inspire a bunch of piousness about ethics and morals and all that high and mighty journalism stuff. Congress also took an interest in how Fox and everyone else in TV news bungled the election. In his testimony in Washington DC in 2001, Roger Ailes actually said he was sorry.

Roger Ailes: 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.

Josh Levin: 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. 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.

on Stewart: This debacle has forced network higher-ups to change their slogan from we report, you decide, to we report, you can suck it. [laughter]

Jenny Backus: That was the beginning of the democratic axiom that Fox News is the axis of all evil.

Josh Levin: 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.

Jenny Backus: 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.

Josh Levin: Fox News producer Ann McGahn had been scandalous when she heard Sean Hannity say that George W. Bush was our guy. Now she started picking up that vibe everywhere at Fox.

Ann McGinn: 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.

Anchor: A special edition of the O'Reilly Factor is on tonight. It looks like George W. Bush has it.

Josh Levin: 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.

Bill O'Reilly: 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.

Josh Levin: 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. It was closing in on CNN. Fox News now had a loyal army of fans. When they called into Fox's weekend media criticism show, they expressed their gratitude for what they were seeing and hearing.

Viewer: You're the only ones who give a fair and balanced news of the election.

Viewer: I did choose Fox after channel surfing because I felt that they were touching the closest to the truth.

Viewer: 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.

Caroline Bruner: We would get messages from people saying, we've burnt the Fox News icon into our TV screens because we have an on all day. When you turn off the TV, you'd still see Fox News burned into the glass.

Josh Levin: Fox producer, Caroline Bruner.

Caroline Bruner: 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.

Josh Levin: 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, Ann 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.

Jim Mills: I would travel around and I would tell people, they'd ask, what do you do? I work for Fox News.

Josh Levin: Capitol Hill producer Jim Mills.

Jim Mills: They said, "Oh, man, Fox. I love Fox. That's all I watch." I would say to them, "Don't do that to your brain."

Micah Loewinger: Thanks for listening to the midweek podcast. New episodes of Slow Burn will be available every week wherever you get your podcasts. If you are one of the many millions of people in this country who likes to get their news in bite-sized chunks on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, you're in luck. OTM has joined the fray. Go follow us over there to see me dip my toes in the whole short-form video thing. Let us know how we're doing in the comments or on our subreddit r/onthemedia. We'd love to hear from you. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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