Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. 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.

Speaker 2: As they passed each other, Hannity made a prediction about the presidential race.

Anne McGahn: I think our guys got this. I had a physical reaction. My head snapped back, and I thought, "Our guy, who's our guy?"

Speaker 4: FOX News now projects George W. Bush the winner in Florida, and thus, it appears, the winner of the presidency of the United States.

Speaker 5: 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.

Speaker 6: I would tell people, they'd ask, what do you do? I work for Fox News. They say, "Oh, man, Fox. I love Fox. That's all I watch." I would say to them, don't do that to your brain.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Michael Lowenger.

Brooke Gladstone: 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. 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. For this hour, we're airing Episode 1 titled, We report you can suck it, which zeroes in on the election night that changed everything. Here's your host, Josh Levine.

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.

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

Josh Levine: 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 Levine: 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.

Mike Schneider: Our news sources, your source for news, Fox News Channel. Roger came to me, and he said, listen, I would like you to anchor our newscaster record every evening.

Josh Levine: Roger was Roger Ailes, the chairman and CEO of the brand new Fox News Channel. He wanted Mike front and center.

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

Josh Levine: 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," and then we're off to the races.

Speaker 7: Just the way you want it. When you want it. The Schneider Report. Weeknights, Fox News Channel.

Josh Levine: 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. Oh, where can I see it? You can't.

Josh Levine: 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 Levine: 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.

Mike Schneider: 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.

Josh Levine: 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, Katheryn 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.

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 the control room. I said, what are we doing next? What are we doing next? What are we doing next? They 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 Levine: 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.

Speaker 8: Tonight Fox presents a special movie presentation--

Josh Levine: Do you remember the movie that they showed?

Speaker 9: Oh God, I don't know. This election day America is going to the dogs. Beethoven with 200 pounds of shedding, drooling Beethoven.

Josh Levine: Oh, the Charles Grodin film. Holy .

Speaker 10: Put some bite into your election night on non-stop Fox.

Josh Levine: Mike didn't get totally drowned out by a drooling St. Bernarde. Twice an hour during commercial breaks, the Fox News hosts would pop in to give updates on the race. Mike Schneider: You can see that Mr. Clinton has now amassed 367 electoral votes according to our account.

Josh Levine: 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.

Speaker 11: Viewership is dismal and some analysts say that Rupert Murdoch has overreached again.

Josh Levine: 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.

Speaker 12: Who will be the next president? You decide in two days. Election day coverage only on the Fox News Channel.

Josh Levine: In just a few years, the Fox News Channel went from non-existent 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 happens, and how it almost didn't. 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.

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

Caroline Bruner: 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.

Josh Levine: 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 Levine: 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, like, set in stone operationally, and you're kind of creating things as you go.

Josh Levine: 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 kick-ass, and I want to be part of it. I needed to be the guy they hired for Capitol Hill.

Josh Levine: 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.

Anne McGahn: 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 Levine: Anne McGahn worked in DC, too. Shed 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.

Anne McGahn: 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 Levine: Whether or not Fox News crashed and burned, Anne 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.

Anne McGahn: 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 Levine: 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 kind of partisan lean in the newsroom.

Anne McGahn: Within the Washington bureau, there were so many more democrats working at least behind the scenes than non-Democrats.

Josh Levine: 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 air graphic.

Anne McGahn: 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.

Josh Levine: 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. Sean Hannity: 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 news gatherers. Those shows were the opinion page, and they got a little bat crazy sometimes.

Josh Levine: The bat-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 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 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, 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.

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

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

Josh Levine: 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, 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.

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.

Josh Levine: 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, 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.

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

Josh Levine: 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. I yell, you big wiener, and he yelled back at me, who you calling Wiener boy? Is what he said, and he drove away.

Josh Levine: That wiener boy incident kicked off a grassroots anti-Bush campaign. Tom launched a weiner boy website and made W is for Weiner buttons that featured a drawing of Bush stuffed inside a hot dog 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.

Speaker 13: The Bush and Gore campaigns don't agree on much, but tonight they do agree on this. The race goes to the wire.

Josh Levine: 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? Hearing me, I said, no. He said, yes. I said, no. He said, yes. I said, really? He said, yes.

Josh Levine: 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, Tom. I said, George Bush. She says I know that. Like she was waiting for this call, you know?

Josh Levine: 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. 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?" So I'm telling anybody that would listen. Hey, did you know? Did you know?

Josh Levine: 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 six o'clock that night, I just watched local news, and I remember thinking, huh? It's not even on there.

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

Speaker 14: Fox News Channel. We report you decide.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, the fairness ideal of the early Fox News network was about to be put to the test.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Michael Owinger. We're listening to Episode 1 of the newest season of Slow Burn about the rise of Fox News. Just before the break, we heard how Democratic activist Tom Connally 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.

Josh Levine: 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.

Anne McGahn: The internal conversation was a healthy debate, as it should be in any newsroom about does this matter. Is this fair?

Josh Levine: 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.

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

Josh Levine: Anne 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 Levine: 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 question. Had Fox News Channel just sunk the Republican presidential candidate?

Speaker 15: There's never been a bigger surprise this late in the game.

Speaker 16: This whole episode has added a dose of uncertainty to the Bush campaign at the worst possible moment.

Speaker 17: The question tonight is whether Bush's decision to keep his arrest from the public will hurt him politically.

Speaker 18: Hang on a second.

Josh Levine: 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. I regret that it happened, but it did. I've learned my lesson.

Josh Levine: 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 suspicion. Thank you all. I've got my suspicions.

Josh Levine: 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.

Speaker 19: Thomas Connolly, a flamboyant Portland lawyer and active Democrat. He now operates an outlandish anti-Bush website called W is for Weiner.

Josh Levine: 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 McGahn watched that focus shift.

Anne McGahn: You saw Fox's coverage change a bit. It was softening.

Josh Levine: 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. 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.

Carl Cameron: Is it fair to call it 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, 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 Levine: 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.

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

Josh Levine: 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? Oreilly 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 McGahn 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.

Anne McGahn: 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."

Josh Levine: On November 7th, 2000, Anne 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. Anne McGahn: 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 Levine: Fox's election special would be hosted by the network's two-star anchors.

Speaker 20: Count on Brit Hume and [unintelligible 00:26:04] for continuing elections tonight coverage that's clear and concise on America's number one network for political coverage.

Josh Levine: 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.

Anne McGahn: I think our guys got this. I had a physical reaction. My head snapped back. I thought, "Our guy? Who's our guy? We have no guy." 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 Levine: 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.

Speaker 21: 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 Levine: 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.

Speaker 22: If we say somebody has carried a state, you can pretty much take it to the bank. Book it. That's true.

Josh Levine: The Fox control room only heard from the decision team through an intermediary who gave Anne's boss a heads-up whenever a call got made.

Anne McGahn: Results are in. This is what it is. Fox News projects.

Josh Levine: At Fox, those projections would trigger an on-screen graphic and sound effect. The whiz-bang.

Speaker 23: New Hampshire.

Speaker 24: Roll the whiz-bang.

Speaker 23: Delaware.

Speaker 24: Oh, I love the whiz-bang.

Anne McGahn: 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.

Josh Levine: That was great. The night's first consequential whiz-bang came around 07:50 PM Eastern Time.

Speaker 25: 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 Levine: Fox News wasn't going out on a limb there. They made their call after CBS, CNN, and NBC.

Speaker 26: He wins the 25 electoral votes. It turns out that Governor George Bush was not his brother's keeper.

Josh Levine: After all those announcements, Gore wins Florida felt like a settled fact and it seemed like the election could be trending his way. Then 2 hours later, everything got unsettled.

Speaker 27: Florida is now too close to call, what the networks giveth, the networks taketh away.

Speaker 28: Computer and data problem one of the CBS News election night headlines of the hour.

Josh Levine: 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 Levine: As Tuesday night turned to Wednesday morning, it felt like nothing was going to break the deadlock, but at 2: 16 AM Eastern, the whiz-bang banged again.

Speaker 29: Fox News now projects George W. Bush the winner in Florida, and thus it appears, the winner of the presidency of the United States.

Josh Levine: 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 there it is. Josh Levine: 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. It wouldn't be just Fox for long. Within minutes, everyone in TV news made the exact same call.

Speaker 30: Oh oh. Something's happened.

Speaker 31: George Bush is the president-elect of the United States.

Speaker 32: Florida goes Bush. The presidency is Bush's. That's it.

Speaker 33: Unless there is a terrible calamity, George W. Bush, by our projections, is going to be the next president of the United States.

Josh Levine: 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.

Anne McGahn: Gore had to call and concede.

Josh Levine: 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.

Speaker 34: The Florida secretary of state says the margin in Florida, get this, folks, 629 votes.

Josh Levine: 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 Levine: 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 f sure? I said, I'm f sure, and I got to go.

Speaker 35: 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 Levine: 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 4:00 a.m. as Gore's campaign chairman called out Fox and everyone else for giving the race to Bush.

Speaker 36: It now appears that their call was premature.

Speaker 37: Is now returning the state of Florida to the too close to call column in light of developments there.

Josh Levine: 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.

Speaker 38: 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 Bush was the presumed president and Gore is trying to snatch something away.

Josh Levine: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, how did a Bush family insider come to be in such an influential position on election night?

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. We're listening to Episode 1 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, "fair and balanced," from the very beginning, it was clear that some hosts, like Sean Hannity, were not following the script. 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.

Josh Levine: 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, so he asked me to come in and sort of do the decision desk team to professionalize the operation there.

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

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

Josh Levine: No one had expected the 2000 election to come down to a couple of 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 the 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 Levine: 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's 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.

Speaker 38: It does not look good for Fox News. I mean, that's just the tree.

Speaker 39: 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.

Speaker 40: It makes me very, very concerned.

Josh Levine: 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 Levine: 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 41: 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 Levine: 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's status was under review. Meanwhile, Fox totally absolved itself of wrongdoing. John Moody said it would have been 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.

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

Josh Levine: 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 span about John Ellis's 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.

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

Josh Levine: 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 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.

Josh Levine: Even if John Ellis did make the Florida call personally, there was still a big unanswered, 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 Levine: 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 nother 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, so 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 Levine: Ellis didn't have the power to make CBS do anything. When Fox made its call at 2:16 AM, 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, 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.

Speaker 42: 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, wed like to be right.

Josh Levine: 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.

Speaker 42: 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. We write our own rules.

Josh Levine: 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 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 Levine: 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's 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 critics, including the Daily Show's Jon Stewart.

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.

Speaker 43: That was sort of the beginning of the democratic axiom that Fox News is the axis of all evil.

Josh Levine: 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.

Anne McGahn: I started wising up during the recount.

Josh Levine: Fox News producer Anne McGahn 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.

Anne McGahn: 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.

Speaker 44: A special edition of the O'Reilly Factor is on tonight. It looks like George W. Bush has it.

Josh Levine: 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.

Speaker 45: 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 Levine: 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. Ehen they called into Fox's weekend media criticism show, they expressed their gratitude for what they were seeing and hearing.

Speaker 46: You're the only ones who give a fair and balanced news of the election.

Speaker 47: I did choose Fox [unintelligible 00:47:17] because I felt that they were touching the closest to the truth.

Speaker 48: 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 it on all day, so when you turn off the TV, you'd still see Fox News burned into the glass.

Josh Levine: Fox producer Caroline Brunner.

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 Levine: 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.

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

Josh Levine: 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.

Josh Levine: Coming up this season on Slow Burn--

Speaker 49: I said to Roger, the last thing you are fair and balanced. That should have been my slogan.

Speaker 50: It was like, oh, I'm living in a Vanity Fair article. Oh, my God. This is insanity.

Speaker 41: He writes it in his book. He tries to make me happy.

Speaker 42: No, no, no. That's--

Speaker 41: Shut up. You had your 35 minutes. Shut up.

Josh Levine: 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. Speaker 43: 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.

Micah Loewinger: 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 Ploog.

Brooke Gladstone: You can listen to the rest of the series @slate.com/slowburn, 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.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.