Everything changed when Fox News declared victory for then-candidate Joe Biden in the swing state of Arizona on the night of the 2020 election. The call was — to many — questionably early, even though the network’s top Decision Desk analysts remained confident that it was the correct call. Hundreds of thousands of uncounted votes were still up in the air that night.
Bret Baier, a hard news personality at Fox, took the brunt of the criticism on social media over the early Arizona call from supporters of former President Donald Trump, as he was on-air for Fox as results poured in across the country, and he was the one who announced the network’s call, alongside anchor Martha MacCallum. The shockingly early Arizona call not only ticked off Trump supporters, but also the Trump campaign itself.
A 2020 AZCentral piece summarized what had happened that night:
In a surprise move on Tuesday night, Fox News, alone among networks, called Arizona for Joe Biden over President Donald Trump, royally ticking off the Trump campaign, reportedly and perhaps understandably.
The network made the call with Biden ahead by 7 percentage points in the race, but with hundreds of thousands of votes yet to be counted in the state, something that chief White House correspondent John Roberts noted when talking to anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, who seemed perplexed by the call.
As it turns out, Baier might have been mistakenly added to the list of media personalities no longer favored by Trump or his tens of millions of supporters. A forthcoming book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, claims that Baier was definitely not okay with his network making the early, controversial Arizona call in Biden’s favor.
In the book, the authors write that Baier penned an email to Fox News president Jay Wallace, indicating, “The Trump campaign was really pissed” over the call and wanted it reversed.
“This situation is getting uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. I keep having to defend this on air,” Baier reportedly added in his email to Wallace.
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The analysts on the Fox News Decision Desk, in charge of announcing election results, stood by their claims and reportedly, at the time, believed that nothing was particularly shocking about their Arizona call. According to Business Insider, Baker and Glasser claim that Baier said the Decision Desk analysts, like former Fox News contributor Chris Stirewalt, only stood by the decision “for pride.”
In the email, the authors of the book claim Baier went as far as to urge Wallace to have the Fox News Decision Desk reverse the Arizona call, even at the risk of taking even more criticism.
“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,” Baier reportedly said, according to the book. Wow.
Insider noted:
The authors called the statement “stunning,” given that Arizona was never in the Trump column, even if his margin of defeat in the state narrowed just after the election. “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,” they wrote.
While Wallace didn’t allow the Arizona call to be reversed, he clearly took Baier’s plea for assistance quite seriously. The book claims that the Fox News president, later on election night, refused to let the network call Nevada, another key swing state, for Biden. The authors wrote that Wallace “did not want Fox to be the first to call the election and declare Biden president-elect.”
Stirewalt was later fired from Fox News. The network said his departure was related to a “restructuring” strategy, but people in the business knew it was more likely because of his controversial Arizona call. Stirewalt would later defend his Arizona call on multiple occasions, most recently in witness testimony during a televised House J6 committee hearing.
With a major election night coming up in roughly seven weeks, it’ll be interesting to see how Fox News rolls out its decisions. Something tells me that we won’t see much in the way of early calls.
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