The Firestorm That Followed Fox News After Election Night 2000.

How the media became the story on election night in 2000.

In our first Slate Plus episode from Slow Burn Season 10, host Josh Levin talks with David Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent and author of the book Murdoch’s World, about Fox News’ founder Rupert Murdoch. Back in 2000, Folkenflik was a media reporter for the Baltimore Sun who covered the fledgling Fox News Channel’s election coverage. His reporting that night—and in the aftermath of Election Day—would shape his professional relationship with Fox News for decades to come. Folkenflik talks about John Ellis, a first cousin of George W. Bush who ran Fox’s decision desk in 2000. Plus, he shares his own experience inside the Baltimore Sun’s newsroom that chaotic election night. Slate Plus members can listen to an audio version of this conversation. Hear more about Fox News and Election Night 2000 in Slow Burn Season 10, Episode 1, “We Report. You Can Suck It.” David Folkenflik: Back in the summer of 2000, I became the media reporter and columnist for the Baltimore Sun. I had just finished up a stint of about three years covering Congress and politics in Washington for the Sun. And I had been invited to think of a new beat, and I came up with the idea of covering the media. But, the convention happened in July, so it really became clear to me that it would be valuable to focus on the intersection, or really the collision of politics and media throughout. Josh Levin: What was your assignment on election night in 2000, and can you set the scene? Where were you watching the returns that night? Folkenflik: On election night, early November 2000, I was in the Baltimore Sun’s old newsroom, on North Calvert Street in downtown Baltimore. Like in the stereotype, the newsroom was humming. There was a ton of life, a lot of people walking around. You had local, national, state elections all occurring on the same evening. A lot was at stake. You know, the Clinton years were coming to an end, and there was this question mark of what was to succeed it. And my assignment as the media guy was to write about how the television networks and maybe the Associated Press handled the coverage of the election night in more or less real time. This was the kind of story that was going to run on something like A12, A17, deep inside the front section of the paper. And there are a lot of people bustling around. You know, it’s exciting. Election nights are exciting. If you can’t get excited about the direction that your community and your nation is about to be headed in, then you probably should rethink whether you want to be a news reporter. Levin: I was thinking you were going to say, “Then you’re probably dead inside.” Folkenflik: You’re probably have a soul that has been curdled in time. Levin: Did you have this enormous bank of televisions where you’ve got CNN, Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC, all up on the screen? Folkenflik: You have a number, if memory serves, of larger TVs that have been effectively attached to these rather non-glamorous columns dotting the newsroom. You took a computer at a place where you commandeer visually several screens at once, and you had also the ability to turn the TV you were watching pretty readily. Levin: It’s like finding a good seat at a sports bar during the NCAA tournament. Folkenflik: Oh, 100%. You know, there’s a high market for political arcana on nights like that. [MUSIC] Levin: So, you had made some plans before that night. You had sent somebody out into the world to gather string for you. Folkenflik: Yeah, I was fairly new to the beat. I think the very first person I sat down with as a non-deadline conversation was with Kim Hume, who had come over from ABC News and was the Fox News Washington Bureau Chief. And so Fox News is one of the first places I introduced myself to and started to make contacts with. On election night, we thought it would be really interesting, and I think Fox was very amenable to this, to have somebody in an election center during that feeding me on election night information about how a national news network makes a call. We had a former intern there as a freelancer. She had been an intern for us and, you know, really sparkled and she had gone on to get a job with another financial publication in New York, but was game to go to Fox for the evening and file some material for me to be able to infuse into my coverage and we thought what a great shtick, right? It was a way of not simply being reactive to what was playing out in our television screens. Levin: Was it significant? That you had sent someone to Fox News on election night as opposed to ABC, NBC, CBS? Folkenflik: Fox was a new player. I thought, what a great opportunity to see how they operate. They’re a different kind of voice. There was something about the notion of Fox doing this that was more interesting than just, you know, picking another network out of the hat. Levin: Yeah. Folkenflik: Here’s somebody building something new from the ground, basically, right? Basing it assuredly on the way things have been in other places, but no doubt trying to differentiate itself. So there was no effort at gotcha here, we were just interested in incorporating it. Levin: And were they interested in being written about? Folkenflik: Absolutely. They were very welcoming at the time. I mean, you know, I imagine if you went to CBS in the 1980s, at a certain point, there would have been an arrogance and a complete confidence about saying whatever you want without repercussions, more or less. And that was not the case at Fox. They were carefully trying to tend their image as this brash place with some conservative voices, but just maybe we’re doing news a little bit differently than the other guys was how they were presenting at this point. Levin: Right. Did you know, going into election night who was running the Fox decision desk? Folkenflik: If memory serves, I had no idea that John Ellis was running, uh, the election desk. And let me be clear, I really enjoy John Ellis’ work, but John Ellis’ name matters for a reason. His name constitutes two-thirds of the name of the then sitting governor of Florida, John Ellis Bush, Jeb Bush. And he was the first cousin of both Governor Bush and the other Governor Bush, who was the Republican nominee, George W. Bush. So, you know, it’s quite an audacious move by Roger Ailes, a former aide to George H. W. Bush, the future president’s father, former aide to Ronald Reagan and to Richard Nixon, three of the last four Republican presidents. To name John Ellis as the head of his election desk. You know, thinking back now and even thinking back a few days or weeks later, so much of Fox’s identity even back then was wrapped up in saying from the outset, the other guys are all in bed with each other. The other guys are all part of this amorphous establishment. The other guys take this as a joke in a some sort of fraternity game. Fox was living that out loud by appointing John Ellis to that job. If there was any doubt in how things were called, you would not want one of the two candidates’ first cousins to be making that decision. Levin: It strikes me looking back that it’s kind of bizarre that the Ellis running the decision desk thing only really became a story after the election, especially because Ellis had written this piece for the Boston Globe, recusing himself from even writing about the election saying that he was biased towards his cousin. And so, why do you think it was that this wasn’t really a story or a scandal before election night? Folkenflik: I think there are probably a couple of reasons. One of which was we were not so in the middle of the internet journalism culture that things whipped around. Drudge existed, but things did not become instantly nationally recognized, simply because somebody wrote about something in a major regional newspaper. You didn’t have Huffington Post. You didn’t have Daily Kos. Levin: So what you’re saying is this is Slate’s fault. It was really on Slate. Folkenflik: Look, I think, look, it’s you could look at me and say “Folkenflik, this is your fault because you didn’t notice that.” I didn’t know it. I didn’t know of that Boston Globe column. If I was aware of that column, I’d forgotten it. I think I simply wasn’t aware of it. Levin: A very particular set of circumstances needed to happen that, to make this the story of the night. Folkenflik: To be the actual state that is run by his other cousin. I mean, there’s 50 states in the union, like the odds are that it’s going to be Florida. Well, better than some. But the odds that it’s going to be Florida are actually pretty limited. Levin: And it also points out that this wasn’t necessarily some evil genius ploy by Ailes or Fox. Like, the idea that Fox would have foreseen everything that was to happen seems beyond, it’s not possible. Folkenflik: I actually completely believe that John Ellis was not named so that they could flip a switch knowing that it was wrong. And somehow dupe the American public into believing something that wasn’t true. I do think that Ellis was named in part because he was a guy they were comfortable with, in part because it’s a way to show the Bush people that they don’t have to worry about hostile forces making these decisions. It’s a signifier to the elite press that might raise the objections after reading the Boston Globe column by Ellis saying, you know, I’m a little biased here, this is a little crazy. It’s them saying, “Hey, we don’t have to live by your rules. We write our own rules.” It’s flipping the bird in sort of an amused way as opposed to pure hostility, right? And so any place that was wanting to establish its credibility from the outset is not gonna name the cousin of a chief presidential candidate to that key role. What was interesting was the way in which John Ellis, the night of, said to my colleague that he was basically making this call. And Fox was for days and weeks after that night saying he had very little to do with it. [MUSIC] Levin: You’re in the office on election night, 7:50 p.m., networks call Florida for Gore. Then they retract it around 10 p.m. Then they call it for Bush a little after 2 a.m. What’s going on with you as all of this is happening? Folkenflik: The media was a lovely side dish to the main course that is American politics and government. And the reality is starting that night, you know, I’ve been on the beat for all of call it four and a half, five months. It’s the main course. It’s right there. It’s being served right in the main meal and you cannot avoid it. The media is part of not just the message, but the moment. And it’s defining what we’re experiencing, but also what’s actually happening. And it’s surreal. Let’s be really clear. Broadcast news outlets have zero constitutional role in determining who our next president is. They’re supposed to just reveal what’s happened. But the way we’ve come to interpret this with live television is that the television networks confer a legitimacy on victory by projecting who’s won and designating what our expectations and beliefs and convictions should be about that outcome. And that night, the closeness of the vote and the seeming precision of the calls, came into stark, not just tension, but conflict. And the story that I was supposed to write, that was clearly going to be headed for some deep inside page and some light little color, became a main story and it keeps bloody changing. Gore wins, Gore’s taken back. Bush wins. Bush is taken back. But before Bush is taken back, you know, Bush is declared to win. You know, there’s that famous call where Gore talks to W and W expects him to concede. Gore says, I don’t think your brother gets to be the controlling legal authority on this. He said something like that. And he’s kind of right. Fox was the first to call the election for Bush. I don’t think that’s by accident. I think everybody else was looking around for somebody else to validate their judgment, but they’re feeling pretty antsy given the mortification here. These networks had called a major state, a major, major swing state for Gore and then pulled it back, which seemed to throw the trajectory of the race in some real doubt. And then by 2:17, Fox is calling the state for George W. Bush. It seems that that’s putting him over the top and that it is determinative. What I heard from folks at other networks was, we thought that this was right too, but it seemed like a tough step to take. And Fox burst the dam on that. And you saw other major news outlets follow. The thing was that, from my perspective, television was also our salvation. You know, the web was there in 2000, but still pretty new and rudimentary. If you’re looking at the Secretary of State’s website in Florida, that was Katherine Harris at the time, a key ally of Gov. Bush down there. It really looks very close. And I was looking at the figures and the difference was just going down and down and down. At a certain point, it was something like 490 votes. Levin: Can I interrupt you and just ask did it occur to you early in the night that maybe you should be monitoring stuff online? Folkenflik: You mean monitoring news outlets online? Or monitoring… Levin: The vote counts, would you have thought there was any reason to do that? Like when you came to work that night, like, “Oh, I should be watching….” Folkenflik: I, there was no, I was not the political team. We’ve got great political reporters in Washington, right? And we’ve got terrific editors in Washington and Baltimore and they’re hardened veterans of this stuff. You know, we had our elections specialists and, you know, our state elections people were also pretty fantastic. And I wasn’t being imaginative about it. I thought my job was to follow what was happening on TV, uh, by and large. Levin: I mean, the thing that’s like totally crazy and that people just, I think will have a hard time believing is that we talked to somebody who has embedded with the CBS and CNN combined decision desks, and they weren’t looking at the Florida Secretary of State website. Folkenflik: I mean, that’s just craziness. Levin: They had the numbers from Voter News Service from VNS, but they weren’t checking them against the data. It just didn’t occur to them. It’s crazy. Folkenflik: Now you see there’s sometimes a divergence, right? You see officially counted votes and you see the projections. And John King will get in front of a magnetic board that didn’t exist in 2000 and say, we know because of what’s happening in Maricopa County, that actually what looks like a pretty strong lead for Trump will basically evaporate. And Fox News made that call in 2020, but at that time you would think that that would not just be a data point, but a huge data point to follow, that they would take advantage of this stuff. I was covering them, covering things I thought, to do it late in the night. Levin: What did you do when you saw that those numbers on the website? Folkenflik: Well, I first tried to flag the attention of editors in Baltimore, and I got nowhere, and so then I called Paul West, who had been my bureau chief in Washington for three years. A very veteran reporter, worked for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, you know he’d been a reporter for many years and an editor for many years, and I said, boss, this is actually way too close for us to be calling. Like, this is just insanity. We’re about to project that Bush has won for our final edition. And I think that’s, that’s craziness. And he said, I’ve just been making the case too. You’re up there. I’m not. You’ve got to go make the case. I mean, at this point, there’s a fairly pitched discussion. It’s not like everybody’s saying, let’s publish. But there’s kind of a default to, well, this is what the networks say. We’ve got to pull the trigger. A couple of our editors were saying, we just need more time. There’s a woman there, wonderful woman who worked on the business side of the Sun, who helped oversee production of the print edition. And she was holding a phone. And this was not a cell phone. This was an old fashioned phone receiver from a landline phone with a cord on it up in the air, and she’s like this is the production crew if we don’t send a thing now we’re going to have to pay them yet another round of overtime and it’s going to be an insane amount of money and these things cost money regardless. But basically, what she’s saying is, “If you’re gonna make a decision in eight minutes anyway, what are you waiting for? You know, like, we have to do this now.” And so, it is a scene out of a movie. I’m, like, working my way through—you’re fighting your way through O’Hare during a snowstorm and a terrorist attack. Like, you’re just wading through bodies trying to get to the top editors to get there. And luckily, you know, I knew them and had good rapport with them. And it was, I think at that point, 600 some votes? I just said there’s no way to declare a winner here. We don’t know. There are too few votes. It could go in either direction. If there’s just a wink one way in some tiny hamlet somewhere, it’ll make us look like fools. If you don’t want to do it on my say so, call Paul West back. Just listen to what Paul has to say, please. I basically dragged him away. He called West, and West said it’s far too close to call. And so that was what we avoided. Our final edition’s headline was “Election Too Close to Call With Florida in the Balance.” We had avoided by a thin margin the embarrassment that accrued to many newspapers. News organizations had called this thing, major networks had called this thing, and then they had to call it back. [MUSIC] Levin: It was obviously too close to call, so why did everybody call it? Folkenflik: The desire to be first is very strong, and I understand why. They get amplified and lifted up in, in the algorithms to the extent any of those social media platforms still care about anything that’s originally reported. They get to be credited often. “First called by ABC News. First called by CBS….” Levin: But the people that were second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth were wrong, too. Folkenflik: Right. You know, I’m a big believer in the prom date theory, which is that somebody becomes much more attractive to other people if somebody else has asked them out first. That outcome, you know, it’s a little hinky, but the AP and Fox have done it. It’s hard to resist. You know, it’s a little tough. For Fox, going first, had the accrued benefit of being as a new player, branding and advertising for them. I’m just saying, if you were to think about it: First Republican president to be elected in the new millennium, and we’re the first folks to call it? Yeah, if we got the data, let’s go. Let’s not wait. Let’s go. Let’s be the one everybody’s turning to and catching up with. Let’s show CNN that in the new millennium, they’ve got to reckon with us rather than us reckoning with them. Levin: So what is your person at Fox News telling you during the night? Folkenflik: She’s exhausted. She goes home early. She goes home before it’s wrapped up, before it’s retracted from Bush. I’m calling her and she said, this is such a chaotic night. I guess I’ll just send you some stuff tomorrow. She had a job that started at eight o’clock in the morning. And she had to wake up for it really early to get there. She was a very young reporter at the time. And she was just overwhelmed by it. She didn’t work for us full time. She was clearly gonna get about three or four hours of sleep that night. I was in no position to browbeat her for it. And the magnitude of what was playing out, I wish I had the insight to say, “Oh, no, this is the story.” I knew that was the story, but I didn’t know her physically being there was the story. And so, we relied on what she had to say. She’s like, here are my impressions. Here’s some notes. She gave them to my editor because I was just on deadline, like pretty much all night. And he said, we can work a bit of this in, but basically we’re going to have to return to this. Levin: When that information was conveyed, what did she tell you she had seen at Fox that night? Folkenflik: Well, John Ellis wasn’t shying away from the idea that he was playing a central role.  At one point he said, you know, I’m going to be making this decision tonight. Some days later, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker writes about Ellis’s role right there. Brilliant, classic Jane Mayer move. She’s not covering election night on a deadline, lost in the weeds. She’s like, what’s with the cousin?  And focuses and drills down on that.  And then it becomes a firestorm. She is a key part of the Washington journalistic establishment by this point. Everybody’s asking about this. And I get these furious calls from Fox. A guy who worked for them called up and said, you have to put her on, meaning the freelancer. You have to put her on. I’m going to arrange a conference call. It wasn’t that he was asking. He wasn’t saying, I need a favor. He said, this is what’s going to happen. I’m going to arrange for the national press corps so they can hear from her how he had nothing to do with that. And I said, she’s going to contradict what you want her to say. Like, so I would put somebody on there, the National Press Corps, and she’s not going to say what you want. I said, I wasn’t there. She’s a good reporter. She was there. And I’m going to stand by my colleague. I will talk to her about coming on that with you. And I will see if she elicited additional information of which I was unaware that might lend credence to what you’re saying. I don’t think we tend to do press calls for you. That doesn’t strike me as a very good idea. But also, I want to figure out if there’s anything that I’m unaware of or overlooking that you’re bringing to my attention. So I go talk to her and she’s like, no, no, this is what the guy said. He said, I’m going to be making this call. Not the only one, but it’s almost as though they were saying everything else we’ve said about the guy is inoperable. He really was a meaningless adornment, like hood adornment. Levin: Uh, I see. Folkenflik: Now, maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s right. It’s not what was reflected in Jane Mayer’s reporting. It’s not what Fox had said. It’s not what John Ellis said himself that night. As a person trying to base what we do on journalism and reporting, we had nothing to support that. And the fact that they were adamant about it was fine from a crisis-management point of view, but not great from a news organization that says it’s rooted in fact. Levin: For you, did it kind of set the tone for a relationship that you would go on to have with them for decades? Folkenflik: This was, you know, five months into my time covering media and was for years a reference point and a grievance point with Fox every time I did some reporting they didn’t like. You know, you tried to screw us over on this and you’ve been trying to screw us ever since. I didn’t try to screw them over at all. I’m trying to go on the basis of what our reporting suggested. And by the way, borne out by everything that John Ellis and other people had to say. [MUSIC] Folkenflik: You know, there’s this great movie, Grand Illusion, have you ever seen that? I haven’t. I have it. It’s great. Black and white. I think it’s in French. It’s about World War I. And you see these two old army generals, one French and the other, this German general who’s better than him, who I think has been imprisoned in this French castle towards the end of World War II, as it’s clear the Germans are going to lose. And the two of them are sitting there and talking. And it’s an incredible set piece because what you realize is even though the French have won and the Germans are going to lose, their aristocratic cadre is losing its grasp on Europe, and they are going to be cast aside, all of them, regardless of nationality, and the time has passed them by. But there is a sense of, look, you know, I beat you on this. You beat me on that. I think we were right on this. I think we were wrong. But there’s a sense of respect and professional rapport. Levin: Yeah Folkenflik: That was not the approach that Fox took in that period, towards what had happened, and I think it comes very much from Ailes. Look, tabloid blood flowed through Fox’s veins from the outset, and that’s a Murdoch thing. But Ailes made it a much more partisan one, and the PR element of that was in some ways the heart of it for him. He used to boast that they had never made a correction, and that was in some ways the most damning thing he could have done to his motto, fair and balanced, because, you know, that’s not how real reporting works. It is a mortal endeavor, it contains inaccuracies, and if you got ‘em, you correct them and move forward. You know. Go on the offense. Don’t explain. Never explain. If you’re explaining, you’re losing. That is a political imperative. That is not a journalistic imperative. There are so many things like that in Fox that he helped to install. Slate is published by The Slate
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