Fox News Execs Were ‘Freaking Out’ After Biden Arizona Call, CEO Proposed Unprecedented Delay in Calling Race: Book

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Fox News executives were “freaking out” at the backlash to their early call that Joe Biden had won the state of Arizona in the 2020 election, and debated an unprecedented delay in calling the race, according to a new book.

Mediaite obtained a copy of The Divider, an upcoming book on Trump by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, which details the fallout at Fox News from that fateful Arizona call.

According to the book, the fury directed at the network by Donald Trump and his supporters was so strong that Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott even proposed the unprecedented step of not calling any more states until the results were certified — a process that can take weeks.

Fox’s Decision Desk was confident in the Arizona call. Executives, under immense pressure from the Trump campaign, were apparently less so.

Per The Divider:

Fox executives were freaking out. At 8:30 the morning after the election, Suzanne Scott, the chief executive officer, even suggested that Fox should not call any more states until they were officially certified by election authorities, heedless of the fact that official state certifications typically took days or even weeks and no network had ever waited until then before telling their viewers who had won.

The Arizona race, for example, was not certified until November 30, nearly four weeks after the election.

The idea was debated internally, per the book:

“We better think it through,” said Bill Sammon, the Washington man- aging editor who oversaw the Decision Desk. “Our enemies—and there are many—will portray this as follows: For the first time in its history, Fox News refuses to project the next president, who just happens to be the Democrat who defeated Donald Trump.”

But a couple other top executives backed up Scott, reflecting how ner- vous the Fox hierarchy was. With the president now attacking rather than promoting their network, the executives saw ratings fall as many of their Trump-supporting viewers turned to Newsmax, the far smaller conserva- tive outlet run by the president’s friend Chris Ruddy, which had not called Arizona for Biden. Ron Mitchell, the Fox ratings guru, would later warn at an internal meeting that the network risked heading down to second or even third place in some hours, “maybe permanently.”

Two days after Election Day, Fox News anchor Bret Baier joined in on the panic. According to The Divider, he sent an email to Fox News president Jay Wallace urging him to rescind the call: “This situation is getting uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. I keep having to defend this on air,” he wrote.

Per The Divider, Baier accused the Decision Desk of standing by the call because of “pride” and added: “It’s hurting us. The sooner we pull it—even if it gives us major egg—and we put it back in his column the better we are in my opinion.”

The fact that Baier was calling on Fox News to not only rescind the call, but to declare Trump the winner of Arizona, was “stunning,” wrote Baker and Glasser.

“Arizona never was in Trump’s column. While the margin of his defeat in the state had narrowed since election night, he still trailed by more than ten thousand votes,” they wrote. “Yet the leading news anchor for Fox was pushing not just to say Arizona was too close to call but to pretend that the president had won it.”

Baier issued a statement through a spokesperson on Tuesday insisting his comments were not presented in full context:

The full context of the e-mail is not reported in this book. I never said the Trump campaign ‘was really pissed’ – that was from an external email that I referenced within my note. This was an email sent AFTER election night. In the immediate days following the election, the vote margins in Arizona narrowed significantly and I communicated these changes to our team along with what people on the ground were saying and predicting district by district. I wanted to analyze at what point (what vote margin) would we have to consider pulling the call for Biden. I also noted that I fully supported our decision desk’s call and would defend it on air.

Jay Wallace reportedly rejected Baier’s request to rescind the call. But the spectacular fallout from the Arizona decision continued — and ended up costing several top Fox News editors their jobs:

Jay Wallace was not ready to do that. But on Friday he overruled the Decision Desk team including Bill Sammon, Arnon Mishkin, and Chris Stirewalt, refusing to let them call Nevada for Biden even after other net- works did, a level of interference that had been unheard of in past elections. The reason had little to do with Nevada. Because of the Arizona projection, calling Nevada would give Biden enough electoral votes for victory. Wallace did not want Fox to be the first to call the election and declare Biden president-elect.

The message about Fox’s course was clear. Sammon, who over twelve years at Fox had called every election correctly and had just been offered a three-year contract extension, was summarily fired. So was Stirewalt, the political editor, who had been with the network for a decade. The executives did not want the embarrassment of publicly owning their deci- sion to push out journalists for making the right call, so they delayed the announcements by two months. They would force Sammon to call his dismissal a “retirement” and negotiate a severance package with a nondis- closure agreement, while Stirewalt’s firing would be characterized as part of a “restructuring.” Whatever they called it, Fox had decided that defer- ence to Trump was more important than getting the story right. “I respect the hell out of you,” Wallace told Sammon, “but it’s turned into a war.”

Fox News responded to the new reporting in a statement: “Fox News made an election night call of historic magnitude and was first to do so. We stood by the call in the days that followed, it was proven correct, and other news organizations eventually joined us.”

UPDATE: Glasser responded to Baier’s statement with one of her own:

We stand by the reporting in our book, and would note that his statement does not deny the accuracy of the email we reported. In addition, it’s especially notable that Baier wrote in the email that it would be better for Fox News “to put it [Arizona] back in [Trump’s] column.” In fact, Arizona was never in Trump’s column.