You might say Fox is a news network in the same sense that 7-Eleven is a sushi restaurant. If you happen to visit a 7-Eleven at precisely the right time, you might find sushi, but it will be sketchy AF, and there’s no guarantee you won’t get sick from it. (Then again, even if the sushi does kill you, Satan’s serpent-festooned face will still be far less alarming than Jeanine Pirro’s amateur screech owl impression.)
But while it’s long been obvious that Tucker Carlson is a Russian asset, Sean Hannity is an oily merkin who grew a face just so he could fib from it, and Steve Doocy spends 80% of his workday tying Brian Kilmeade’s brain into an increasingly baroque series of balloon animals, the network has recently taken several body blows to its credibility. Recall that Fox’s grand pooh-bah Rupert Murdoch recently admitted, in a deposition related to Dominion Voting Systems $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network, that Fox News hosts “endorsed” the Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election.
Well, The New York Times has given us yet another look at the sausage-making at Fox Corporation’s HQ—and yes, it’s really fucking gross. You see, normally a news network that scooped every other outlet on one of the biggest election stories of the year would be beaming with pride. But not Fox. After the network correctly called Arizona on election night for President Joe Biden, its leaders went into a panic. Because the very last thing Fox viewers want is the unvarnished truth. In fact, the backlash to Fox’s objectively reporting empirical facts was so severe, the network held emergency meetings to ensure it would never happen again.
[O]n Monday, Nov. 16, 2020, Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, and Jay Wallace, the network’s president, convened a Zoom meeting for an extraordinary discussion with an unusual goal, according to a recording of the call reviewed by The New York Times: How to keep from angering the network’s conservative audience again by calling an election for a Democrat before the competition.
Maybe, the Fox executives mused, they should abandon the sophisticated new election-projecting system in which Fox had invested millions of dollars and revert to the slower, less accurate model. Or maybe they should base calls not solely on numbers but on how viewers might react. Or maybe they should delay calls, even if they were right, to keep the audience in suspense and boost viewership.
Why does this remind me of Donald Trump’s admonition, regarding COVID-19, to “slow the testing down, please”? Sure, Fox has never really been anything but infotainment, but it’s kind of shocking to see any news organization go out of its way to ensure its employees do an objectively worse job.
“Listen, it’s one of the sad realities: If we hadn’t called Arizona, those three or four days following Election Day, our ratings would have been bigger,” the Times quoted Scott as saying. “The mystery would have been still hanging out there.”
Uh-huh. Or you could shut your damn doors altogether and the mystery of what happened to the killer migrant caravans that only seem to pop up during midterm elections would haunt Grandma forever. “Oh, no! Where are they now? I heard they were all lined up for the early bird special at Applebee’s. Better try Olive Garden instead!”
Meanwhile, two of Fox’s news-ish anchors were convinced that weird, abstract concepts only nerds care about (i.e., numbers) should take a back seat to the piquant meat sweats of the network’s pro-MAGA audience.
Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the two main anchors, suggested it was not enough to call a state based on numerical calculations, the standard by which networks have made such determinations for generations, but that viewer reaction should be considered. “In a Trump environment,” Ms. MacCallum said, “the game is just very, very different.”
Yes, it is different. That’s been made abundantly clear, hasn’t it?
For her part, Scott had decided that the network’s coy game of let’s pretend was more important than reporting the facts. The morning after Election Day, she suggested that Fox should refuse to call any more states until their results were officially certified by authorities. And some in the network were even lobbying to rescind Fox’s correct Arizona call.
“It’s hurting us,” Baier wrote to Fox President Jay Wallace and others. “The sooner we pull it even if it gives us major egg. And put it back in his column. The better we are. In my opinion.”
Hmm. “We Don’t Report, You Decide Based on Intentionally Misleading Information.”
Of course, the reason Fox execs were so alarmed by the network’s correct Arizona call is that Trump had planned to declare victory on election night to make it easier for him to steal the election. Fox, of all networks, threw a monkey wrench into that shambolic plot. But that doesn’t mean Fox’s C-suite was going to stand still for accurate reporting coming from their hard news team.
Bill Sammon, the network’s managing editor for Washington (who had just been offered a new three-year contract), and Chris Stirewalt, the Fox News editor who went on the air to defend the network’s Arizona call, were soon let go, presumably to mollify Trump and his frothing orc horde.
In a feature on Stirewalt in The Daily Beast, the former Fox editor—who famously testified before the House Jan. 6 committee—bemoaned his departure, and noted that the network’s dishonest appeasement of Trump in the immediate aftermath of the election had augured even worse things to come.
Following the election, Fox News briefly went through a massive ratings slump, seemingly due to enraged Trump supporters abandoning the network in favor of far-right alternatives willing to push Trump’s election lies. Eventually, with the Murdochs in need of scapegoats, Stirewalt was among those “purged” by the network.
“Well, it was, it was, um, as a father, it was—as a father it was very challenging because I did not know how I was going to tell my sons that I was unemployed,” a somewhat emotional Stirewalt recounted. “Because, you know, you're just making me think about um, how I felt thinking about having to tell my kids and it was a terrible feeling of humiliation that you have to tell your kids that you lost your job.”
The former Fox personality also said “the amount of ignorance and the amount of willful ignorance was concerning and disappointing,” adding that it was a “foretaste of what was to come” from Trump and right-wing media.
Unfortunately, as we all now know, that “foretaste” quickly became an unwelcome aftertaste—and thanks to Fox and others of its ilk, it lingers on the tongue to this day.
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.
