The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--And Divided a Country (42 page)

After a few days of sniping, both sides stood down.
Drudge agreed to cancel his contract, which had more than a year to go.
“The network cannot live by the standards of the Internet, where each person is his own writer, editor and publisher,” Ailes told a reporter. Drudge’s exit signaled that Ailes’s Lewinsky train had reached the end of its line.

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MERICANS MADE THEIR QUADRENNIAL PILGRIMAGE
to the voting booth on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 7, 2000, John Prescott Ellis, first cousin of George W. Bush and the chief of Fox News’s “decision desk,” hustled into a second-floor conference room to brief Roger Ailes, anchors, and producers on the state of the race.
A confidant of his cousin’s presidential campaign, Ellis was part of the story he was covering, managing the team of analysts responsible for how Fox News would call winners and losers.
In an hour, Brit Hume would begin anchoring the channel’s live election night coverage.

For the conservatives around the conference table—Ailes, John Moody, Brit Hume, Fred Barnes,
Weekly Standard
editor and Fox News contributor Bill Kristol, and Fox News analyst Michael Barone—Ellis painted a depressing picture. Exit polls showed Hillary Clinton coasting to victory in the New York Senate race.
Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore was surging, winning so-called late deciders by a two-to-one margin. Michigan and Pennsylvania, key battleground states, were breaking his way. More ominously for the George W. Bush–Dick Cheney ticket, Gore was pulling ahead in Florida.
For weeks, the consensus had been that the Sunshine State would be ground zero on election night. The best news Ellis could offer was that Gore would likely be denied an early victory.
The electoral math was such that Gore could not get over the top until the polls closed in California at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time.

After the briefing, Ellis slipped out of the building for a cigarette. At forty-seven, with wavy brown hair and a wry sense of humor, Ellis exuded privilege and confidence. It was not the first time he’d been a kind of double agent.
In 1978, as his uncle Poppy Bush was mounting a run for
the GOP presidential nomination, Ellis joined NBC News as a producer in the election unit.
In 1993, Ellis landed a political column at
The Boston Globe
. Ellis’s role as a Bush family surrogate eventually complicated his role as a
Globe
pundit.
“Looking back over the last 6½ years, the collected lies of William Clinton test the hard drive of memory,” he wrote in a column in May 1999. On July 3, Ellis recused himself from covering politics.
“Loyalty supersedes candor,” he wrote. “I am loyal to my cousin, Governor George Bush of Texas. I put that loyalty ahead of my loyalty to anyone else outside my immediate family.… There is no way for you to know if I am telling you the truth about George W. Bush’s presidential campaign.… And there is no way for you to know whether I am telling you the truth about Al Gore’s presidential campaign.”
Three weeks later, he gave up his column entirely.

Ailes expressed no reservations about bringing Ellis to Fox. In the early 1990s, Ellis worked for him at Ailes Communications. It was Ellis who helped secure his lucrative consulting contract with Paramount Television at a moment when Ailes was transitioning out of politics. In 1998, Ellis ran Fox’s election unit, his first experience in such a role.
“We at Fox News do not discriminate against people because of their family connections,” Ailes later said.

As Ellis smoked his cigarette outside the Fox studios, he dialed Bush in Austin. Earlier that afternoon, he had told Bush, who sounded tense,
“I wouldn’t worry about early numbers. Your dad had bad early numbers in ’88, and he wound up winning by seven.”

Now that Gore’s apparent advantage was widening, Bush wanted to know what his cousin thought.

“I have no idea,” Ellis said.

Bush told Ellis to stay in regular contact throughout the night.

Ellis ended the call and stamped out his cigarette. There was one more meeting he had to attend.
Ailes was waiting upstairs for a private briefing in his office
before venturing over to the Fox Sports Suite, a reception space on the second floor where Murdoch and senior News Corp executives would watch the returns come in. Ailes wanted fresh intelligence.

“What’s your gut say?” Ailes asked.

Ellis pantomimed a knife motion across his throat.

I
n the messy aftermath of the 2000 election night debacle, and Fox’s central role in the recount drama, liberals would single out the presence of
John Ellis as evidence of a conspiracy to propel Bush into the White House. The truth was more complicated. But Ailes’s decision to place a candidate’s cousin in charge of calling an election, regardless of his conduct on election night, reflected a lack of concern about journalistic standards.

Ellis’s Bush family ties were not the only factor that made him a controversial choice to direct Fox News’s election night coverage.
While Ellis certainly possessed a sophisticated understanding of national politics, he lacked the mathematical skill that was essential to understand the complex computer models that guided the on-air calls.
“From what Ellis says, he does not know how to read the screens,” said Warren Mitofsky, the longtime head of CBS News’s election operation, who is credited with creating the modern exit poll. “I cannot, for the life of me, imagine what Ellis is doing when he makes calls.”

Ellis’s decision team was made up of three people.
They included John Gorman, a longtime Democratic pollster who had worked for George McGovern and Jimmy Carter; Arnon Mishkin, a Boston Consulting Group partner and former NBC News analyst; and Cynthia Talkov, a Berkeley-educated statistician, who worked with Gorman at his polling firm, Opinion Dynamics.
Fox News received its election night information from the Voter News Service, a consortium established in 1993 by the Associated Press and the five major television networks—ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox—to cut costs by sharing the burden of conducting exit polls and tallying vote counts for Senate, congressional, and presidential races. The consolidated system would become one of the factors that led to the disastrous 2000 results.
Although the networks all used the same raw data, each outlet fielded their own decision teams (except CBS and CNN, who shared a joint unit). On election night, when millions of viewers were up for grabs, the pressure to be first—or at least not be last—created perverse incentives inside the competing newsrooms to make premature calls.

Cynthia Talkov, who was mentored by Warren Mitofsky and whom Ellis would later describe as his “statistical wizard,” knew immediately that something was off about Fox News when she joined the decision team for the primaries. To Talkov, Fox seemed like a seat-of-the-pants outfit. She observed Ellis and her colleagues struggle to grasp the Voter News Service computer models.
“They didn’t understand half the numbers on the screen.… I couldn’t believe how unqualified they were,” she later recalled. “They weren’t listening to me. I thought maybe it was because
I was a woman, I didn’t know.”
As a last resort, she brought in the editorial director of the Voter News Service, Murray Edelman, to tutor them on the computer system. Edelman was equally unnerved.
“My God, you were right!” he told her after the session.
Ellis, Edelman later recalled, was “so arrogant, as though he knew it all. When I talked with him, I thought, ‘Whoa!’—he was so confident, but knew so little.”

And then there was the politics. Although she had worked for the Voter News Service and done opinion polling for Gorman, Talkov never paid much attention to the actual campaigns. She was a moderate Democrat, and had voted for Bill Clinton, but to her, candidates were names “all flagged either Democrat or Republican” on a screen.
“I enjoy crunching numbers,” she said. “I’m not in the world of media or politics in any shape or form. People say to me, ‘what’s going on?’ I just tell them, ‘ask my mother, she’s home watching CNN. I don’t know who the candidates are.’ ” So it was a shock to arrive at Fox News and find Ellis, Gorman, and Mishkin gossiping on the phone with political operatives from both parties.
“I was brought up in the ranks that we do not talk to any campaigns on election night,” Talkov said. But her initial surprise was nothing compared with the surreal experience she had during the New Hampshire primary.
When Ellis stepped away from his desk, Talkov noticed his phone ringing and leaned over to pick it up.

“We’re surging now!” the voice said.

“Who is this?”
she asked.

“George Bush,” the voice returned. “Is my cousin there?”

Talkov was incredulous. VNS numbers were supposed to be strictly confidential. If Ellis disclosed exit poll data to a campaign, he would be in violation of the consortium’s ironclad contract.

When Ellis got back to his desk after his post-cigarette meeting with Ailes, Talkov was hunched over her screen reading the latest exit poll numbers.
The new data stream only bolstered the prediction Ellis had just given Ailes. North Carolina and West Virginia were listed as “too close to call,” and Bush was “flat in Ohio,”
the state that had elected every president since 1964. The worst news came from the state that mattered most. Shortly after the Florida polls closed at 7:00 p.m., the trend lines shifted in Gore’s direction.
At 7:50, the VNS computer showed Gore with a 99.5 percent chance of winning Florida. The “status” menu on the screen read: “Call.”

Ellis’s former colleagues at NBC News did not wait for the official VNS go-ahead.
At 7:49, Tom Brokaw announced on air,
“We’re going to
now project an important win for Vice President Al Gore.”
Thirty-one seconds later, Dan Rather declared Gore the Florida victor.
CNN echoed Rather’s call. John Moody needed an answer from Ellis.
It was up to Moody to sign off on all the calls. He would relay the word to
Fox News Sunday
producer Marty Ryan in the control room, who would in turn speak the result into Brit Hume’s earpiece.
Ellis polled his team about calling Florida. “Any objections?” They all agreed it was Gore.
At 7:52, Hume made the pronouncement.

In Bushworld, the Florida call rankled.
The polls had yet to close in the Republican-dominated Panhandle. How could they call it for Gore when citizens were still voting?
Bush’s senior strategist Karl Rove directed aides to call news executives and complain. Moments after Fox’s call, Ellis’s phone rang.
“Jeb, I’m sorry,” Ellis said, speaking to W.’s younger brother, the governor of Florida. “I’m looking at a screenful of Gore.” Jeb asked Ellis about the polls in the conservative Panhandle counties that had not yet been tallied. “I’m sorry. It’s not going to help,” he said.

Upstairs, in the Fox Sports Suite, the mood was funereal.
Ten minutes after calling Florida, the networks named Michigan for Gore, another blow for Bush.
Ailes sat in a plush armchair, phone glued to his ear, fielding updates from John Moody. “You could see Roger hanging on every word,” one person in the room recalled. “It was like the old school. He wasn’t even trusting what was going on the screen.” His senior executives—Bill Shine, creative director Richard O’Brien, and director of newsgathering and operations Sharri Berg—stood nearby, gloomily watching the screens.
At 9:00 p.m., Hume put Pennsylvania in the Gore column.

Ellis was now virtually certain that his cousin would lose. W., however, wasn’t ready to concede.
“I think Americans oughta wait until all the votes are counted,” he told reporters in Austin. “I don’t believe the projections. In states like Florida, I’m gonna wait for them to call all the votes.”

On the Fox News decision desk, Ellis scanned the screens and saw the Florida numbers going haywire.
“Can you guys take a look at Florida, please? I think we may have to pull down the call,” he said.
A message flashed on the VNS monitor. There were irregularities in Duval County, a Republican stronghold on the Atlantic coast, about twenty miles south of the Georgia state line.
“We are canceling the vote.… Vote is strange,” the message read.
It turned out that a VNS employee had incorrectly entered data into the system, giving Gore 43,023 votes instead of the much
lower actual total of 4,301. Ellis huddled with his team and Moody.
The VNS screen showed the letters REV, short for “reversal.” They agreed it was time to pull it down. Moody relayed the news to Ryan. Hume declared Florida back up for grabs, as did all the networks.
At 10:23, Hume called Gore’s home state of Tennessee for Bush.

In the Sports Suite upstairs, the vibe around Ailes improved considerably. “It had been kind of a somber mood. Then it became a lot more celebratory,” one executive in the room recalled. “You sensed you could change history here.”

E
llis later recalled that he became certain his cousin would win Florida—and the presidency—at 1:55 a.m.
In a first-person account of his election night activity for
Inside
magazine, Ellis wrote that he scrutinized the VNS data, which showed Gore failing to win enough of the remaining votes to overtake Bush’s several-thousand-vote lead. Ellis called Bush to give him the remarkable news.

“What do you think?” Bush asked.

“I think you’ve got it.”

After hanging up, Ellis turned to his team.
“Any reason not to call Bush in Florida? It’s the whole deal, so if you’re not sure, say so.”
The analysts still wanted more time. Ellis told Moody he had confidence in a Bush-Cheney victory.
“John, based on these numbers … he can’t lose Florida.”

The minutes ticked by.
Ailes, who had left Fox around midnight for a nearby hotel, received updates from Moody.

At 2:07 a.m., the VNS screen showed Bush ahead in Florida by 29,000 votes, with 96 percent of the votes counted. Ellis was eager to make the call.
Cynthia Talkov, who was sitting next to Ellis, did not observe him studying the statistics on the screen, as Ellis would write for
Inside
.
Nor did he discuss with her Gore’s “need/get” ratios, the projections Ellis would cite as the basis for making the call.
Around 2:10 a.m., Talkov observed Ellis conferring with his cousins in Austin. When he hung up the phone, his eyes lit up.
“Jebbie says we got it! Jebbie says we got it,” he said.