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When Donald Trump supporters gathered outside a vote-counting center in Phoenix, Arizona, Wednesday night, they had a simple and perhaps unexpected chant: “Fox News sucks!”
Although the channel has become synonymous with Trump’s rise to power, in the past two days Fox News has become the focus of anger from the Trump campaign after it made an advance call Tuesday night that the state of Arizona went to Joe Biden.
In the process, the channel diverted media attention from Trump’s substantial success in Florida and undermined the president’s attempts to focus attention on the vote count in Pennsylvania.
Such was the level of anger within the Trump campaign over the call that his team reportedly tried to have the decision overturned. According to the New York Times, this involved Jared Kushner contacting Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, while in the Vanity Fair reports it was the president himself who called the media mogul. Regardless of who made the calls, Fox has stuck to its decision, much to the annoyance of many of its viewers who have bombarded the channel with complaints.
The decision to call Arizona’s ultra-close race for Biden, a call that was later copied by the Associated Press, which provides results data to the Guardian, was made by Fox’s Arnon Mishkin, who heads the broadcaster’s decision desk. Before the election, Mishkin, a registered Democrat who has worked for Fox News for decades, made it clear that he would not be swayed by internal pressure when calling states.
While most people will probably be watching the results of the White House race, more than 7,000 elections will take place in the United States on Tuesday, November 3.
In the era of disinformation, it is more important than ever that the media report election results as clearly and transparently as possible.
The Guardian will use the data collected and analyzed by the Associated Press (AP) as a source for when we will call up the results of elections for the presidency, the Senate, the House elections and others. AP has a team of thousands of specialists and correspondents throughout the United States, who have trusted relationships with local officials. This will guide your data-driven assessment of when it’s time to call a race.
There are a number of other highly reputable electoral “decision desks” in the American media. They can call races before AP. While The Guardian will report that this is happening, we will rely on AP data to make our own final call.
If any candidate declares victory prematurely, we will report this claim, but clarify that it is invalid. The only measure of victory is a complete count of all outstanding votes.
As a result, Mishkin has been portrayed as a defender of the truth, representing the uneasy balance that exists between Fox’s straight news division and the highly opinionated right-wing anchors who shape the external perception of the channel.
On Thursday, Mishkin, who has become a target for angry Trump supporters, told the channel’s viewers that he would not change his mind on the grounds that “we strongly believe that our call will stand, and that is why we will not let’s back down the call. “
Dismissing the Trump team’s claims that they could still get ahead of the ultra-close race as more votes were counted, a visibly exasperated Mishkin dismissed, saying the objections were like talking about what would happen “if a frog had wings.”
“We are confident that the data will basically look like the data that we have noticed throughout the count in Arizona,” he said.
Trump and his team have an increasingly complicated relationship with Fox News. Throughout his presidency, he has been an obsessive observer of the channel, often commenting on his Twitter account about his audience ratings when opposing his coverage and telephoning to dispute specific topics.
On Election Day he complained on the air that the channel’s coverage wasn’t supportive enough: “Someone said what the difference is between this and four years ago, and I say Fox… In the old days you didn’t put ‘Sleepy Joe’ every time you open your mouth. There were more Democrats than there were Republicans. I’m not complaining. I just tell people. “
One of the biggest questions in the right-wing American media is what happens if Trump loses the election, with long-standing speculation that he might be tempted to start his own media outlet in an attempt to communicate directly with his supporters.
