Fox News’ own team unhappy with network’s election night calls: Behaving like a Super PAC for the DNC
Both Brit Hume and Tucker Carlson on Fox News expressed annoyance with their network for prematurely calling Arizona for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race last night. Fox appeared to hesitate to call states for President Trump as well.
Fox News was the first network to call Arizona for the Democrat presidential nominee. They also called the US Senate race in that state for Democrat Mark Kelly over incumbent GOP Sen. Martha McSally.
As of this morning, Arizona was removed from the ‘win’ column for Biden by the New York Times. The state is still being called by Fox News for Biden. It was still being reported, however, that Kelly had won against McSally. If that is true, it would mean that Arizona has gone from red to blue in two years.
Fox politics editor, Chris Stirewalt, and Decision Desk head, Arnon Mishkin, came under fire for calling Arizona. “I’m sorry, we’re not wrong,” Mishkin said.
Many Republicans and Team Trump officials called the network to complain that it was far too early to make that call.
Brit Hume was very frustrated over Arizona. He was also upset that other states where polls closed hours earlier, such as Georgia and North Carolina, had yet to be called. Both states were pink on Fox’s election map in favor of Trump but remained in the ‘undecided’ column as of this morning.
LOL. @brithume getting frustrated that Fox hasn’t called a bunch of states. pic.twitter.com/WlRSIZqNuy
— Matthew “Need A PS5” Betley🇺🇸 (@MatthewBetley) November 4, 2020
Tucker Carlson was also perturbed over the situation. He noted that even Arizona governor, Doug Ducey, said Fox News called the state too early.
“There has been a great deal of pushback from the President, his staff, and the governor of Arizona,” Carlson stated.
“I’m not privy to the math, I’m not certain how that — even after the explanation from Chris Stirewalt — how that decision was made, so I’m sure there’s a reason for it,” he continued. “I don’t know what it is. I know that people are very concerned about the media in general. I think our viewers trust us, but people are concerned.”
Since Fox News made its utterly indefensible early call for Biden in Arizona (before upwards of a million Election Day votes were counted), Trump has cut Biden's lead by nearly a third. And we're still only at 77% reporting (Fox called it at 73%).
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) November 4, 2020
Carlson negated the idea that pre-election polling was accurate as well. “It’s just not true. If it were true, The New York Times wouldn’t have given Joe Biden a 70 percent chance this morning of winning Florida. Some were good, some were bad,” he pointed out.
Carlson went on to chastise the media more broadly and say “we should be honest about the times that we were wrong.”
Brett Baier asked Tucker, “Is the polling industry dead?”
“I really hope so,” Carlson said. “I can name some of the people that should be fired immediately. And I think I will. I just need to calm down enough to get their names on paper.”
Just spoke to AZ Governor Doug Ducey's office. There are at least 900,000 votes outstanding that haven't been counted. About half are Maricopa. W/ every update, they say it's breaking significantly toward Trump 2-1.
Doesn't mean a Trump win, but that's still a lot of uncounted
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) November 4, 2020
“We in the media are particularly good at pretending there’s some reason that we misled our viewers or our readers, and we really should stop doing that because too much is at stake,” he continued.
“The first way to fix it is by holding people accountable, and that’s just by firing them, and they can go do something useful like hang drywall or learn to paint or do something else,” he stated. “But they cannot keep discrediting the work of the rest of us by screwing up in the way that they have.”
“I think that’s a fair ask,” Carlson concluded.
🔥 Just got off the phone with a senior Trump campaign adviser:
"Fox News is behaving like a Super PAC for the DNC tonight. I have no idea what they are thinking. We will win. They have misled America. Who is going to be fired for this at @FoxNews?"
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) November 4, 2020
Arizona's governor, who knows a bit about counting votes in Arizona, says Fox had zero business calling the state for Biden given the facts on the ground. https://t.co/SiMfSKR07W
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) November 4, 2020
