Arizona calls vindicate Fox News Decision Desk
Opinion by
Media critic
November 13, 2020 at 10:57 a.m. CST
Fox
News was right, after all.
Late
Thursday, The Post, the New York Times, NBC News and CNN reported
that President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris had
won Arizona — more than a week after Fox News and the Associated Press made the
same call on election night. The decision prompted hardly a ripple on the news
front, considering that the networks and the AP had called the race for the
Biden-Harris ticket Saturday morning. Other, more pressing stories right now
include President Trump’s apparent boycott of his official duties and his
ongoing efforts to delegitimize the election.
Yet
this is a media story worth examining for what it says about the relationship
between Fox News and the fan base that it shares with President Trump. At 11:20
p.m. on election night, Fox News’s Decision Desk jumped out ahead of the
competition and placed Arizona — and its 11 electoral college votes — in the
Biden-Harris column. The backlash from Trumpers was immediate and furious. They
attacked again and again — protesting rhetorically, online and even in person
in Arizona itself.
And
they were wrong. A sweeter and more resounding moment of media vindication
doesn’t come readily to mind.
The
victory party for this particular instance of quantitative political wisdom is
off-limits to Fox News opinion hosts such as Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and
Laura Ingraham. They’re pro-Trump propagandists, allergic to fact and fairness,
who undermined confidence in the election (as our colleague Greg Sargent
pointed out). Hannity last Thursday night claimed that “any” call on
Arizona was “premature" — marking another occasion that Hannity contradicted news-side
colleagues trying to get the story right. That’s business as usual
in Fox News’s opinion precincts, which for five years have been shoving aside
ethics and decency to promote Trump’s talking points.
The
news division at Fox, however, has had some crevices where integrity is
permissible. A nice example is the Fox News Brain Room, a research unit that
produced the famous dossier on Ukraine that busted Hannity for laundering
pro-Trump talking points about the most egregious scandal of his administration.
The Brain Room, to the consternation of the Erik Wemple Blog, was gutted in a recent
restructuring. There’s also the Fox News polling unit, a respected
group that has long adhered to industry standard methodologies (which are,
again, coming under fire this election
cycle).
And
then there’s the Fox News Decision Desk, a redoubt of quantitative-oriented
political fiends who make some of the network’s most consequential decisions.
They share office space in the network’s “nerdquarium,” which is
essentially quarantined from the rest of the organization. The Decision Desk’s
director is Arnon Mishkin, a registered Democrat who has been analyzing
elections for Fox News since the late 1990s and took over the decision desk in
2008. The operation took a turn in the limelight on election night
2012, when it called Ohio for President Barack Obama, provoking
on-air gripes from analyst Karl Rove. The decision desk stood firm, and
prevailed.
The
2012 episode felt quaint and low-stakes when compared with last week’s uproar
over Arizona. At the time that Mishkin & Co. made their call, Biden hadn’t
expanded the electoral map Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Trump, meanwhile, took
Florida and, again, defied polls showing Biden with big leads in battleground
states.
So the
call jarred the Trump campaign. A discrepancy surfaced within major media
organizations: Here was Fox News, a reliably pro-Trump network calling a key
state against the president, while the “liberal” media — newspapers such as the
New York Times and The Post, plus the major broadcasters — clung to the mantra
of modern election night journalism: Proceed with caution. Fox News and the
mainstream media weren’t adhering to their prescribed roles in American politics.
“What is going on in that network?” asked voices on the right.
That
night, Fox News brought on Mishkin to answer that question. Anchor Bret Baier
sought assurance that Mishkin was “100 percent sure” given what Baier described
as “incoming” backlash against the network. “We made the correct call, and
that’s why we made the correct call when we made it. I’m sorry,” responded Mishkin.
The
Associated Press called Arizona for Biden a few
hours after Fox News. There’s a reason that these two outlets
reached the same call: AP and Fox News operate independent decision desks,
though they participate in a partnership with the University of Chicago to
furnish data for election calls. Fox News calls its gizmo the Fox News Voter
Analysis (FNVA), whose methodology page explains
the level of rigor that goes into the product: “The FNVA survey encompasses
interviews with an estimated 110,000 registered voters and is conducted Oct. 26
to Nov. 3, and continues through the end of voting on Election Day,” it notes.
“Both voters and nonvoters are interviewed to provide a full picture of the
election, including why some Americans voted while others stayed at
home.” AP has what it calls VoteCast,
a product that it says is an improvement over exit polls.
Meanwhile,
the alphabet soup networks — ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, CNN — share data
under the National Election Pool and rely on Edison
Research, which also called Arizona for Biden on Thursday night.
(The Post also relies on Edison, so waited until Thursday night to report that
Biden had flipped Arizona.) With 16,000 votes left to be counted, Biden leads
by 11,000 votes, which is enough to carry him to the conclusion, according to these outlets and the
independent Decision Desk HQ.
Whatever
the data sources and methodologies, the right wasn’t cool with the work of the
Fox News Decision Desk. Characterizing all the mayhem that stemmed from the Fox
News call on Arizona requires bullet points:
· The Trump
campaign communications director attacked the call on Fox News’s airwaves:
· Florida
Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted the network: “For
Fox to be so resistant to calling Florida and yet jumping the gun on Arizona, I
just thought was inexplicable. I don’t think that that was done without some
type of motive, whether it’s ratings, whether it’s something else.”
· Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller hammered
Fox News via phone, according to the New York Times,
and on Twitter:
· Jared
Kushner, a top Trump adviser, was “in touch” with News Corp Executive Chairman
Rupert Murdoch, also according to the Times.
· Pro-Trump
protesters last Wednesday night in Phoenix chanted “Shame on Fox,” according to Times correspondent Simon
Romero.
· The
Arizona Republican Party demanded the network retract its call.
The
freakout was so complete, so over-the-top that a novice in American civics
might have supposed that Fox News was a government entity entrusted with
counting the votes. In reality, a mind-melded group of people who didn’t know
what they were talking about attacked a group who did know what they were
talking about.
Just
weeks after then-candidate Donald Trump kicked off his campaign in June 2015,
he tangled with then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s tough questions in a primary
debate. From that point onward, Trump thrived on the rhetoric of Hannity and
his gang while slamming the parts of Fox News that dared to tell the truth in
defiance of him. That conflict forms the heart of CNN host Brian Stelter’s 2020
book “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and
the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.”
In
retrospect, the attack on the Fox News Decision Desk merely extends Trump
world’s record of bombarding rigor and expertise. FNVA’s methodology page
outlines the national and state surveys, sampling and weighting considerations
and more. It’s just the sort of process for which a guy like Trump has no
respect or patience. We’ll wait to see whether all those folks demanding
retractions of Fox News’s Decision Desk retract their demands.
Arnon
Mishkin is probably the happiest man in America right now.
Through
his tweets, his interviews and his bullying, Trump has expressed a sense of
entitlement to sycophantic treatment by Fox News. To a large extent, he has
succeeded. It’s tempting to believe that this dynamic will wane in a post-Trump
world. It won’t, however: Trump and his followers appear to be morphing into an
American permanent lying class, and, once out of government, they’ll have even
more time to hassle the media. Beware, journalists.
