The Last Election Cost $787 Million. How Will a Chastened Fox ...

Former President Donald Trump speaks on stage during a Fox News Iowa Town Hall. Sipa via AP Images.

Four years ago, Fox News’s coverage of the 2020 election sparked outrage from then-President Donald Trump’s campaign, an exodus of viewers furious that they had called the key state of Arizona for current President Joe Biden, and a pair of billion-dollar defamation lawsuits from voting tech companies that had been the subject of conspiracy theories surrounding the election.

This year, the network has implemented measures to try and avoid their past mistakes. The result, according to people I spoke with inside the network and across the industry, will be a quieter, more cautious Fox.

As the country braces for what promises to be another wild sprint from Tuesday to the inauguration, Fox News is under a microscope as every facet of how they cover the biggest night in news will be scrutinized. For a sense of what’s in store, it’s worth going back to 2020.

The start of the trouble for Fox was election night itself, when Trump told supporters around 2:30 a.m., despite millions of ballots still being counted, that he had won. The rest is well-trodden history. The network’s early but ultimately accurate Arizona call for Biden set off a firestorm. Trump campaign staffers called Fox executives in a rage. Viewers chanted “Fox News sucks” outside its sets and fled in droves to alternative networks like Newsmax.

As demonstrated in the evidence that spilled out of the Dominion lawsuit, network leadership knew that Trump’s claims of a rigged election were bogus. In those first few days, they took some action to keep those claims off the air. Rupert Murdoch instructed Fox CEO Suzanne Scott to keep an eye on Fox’s pro-Trump prime time hours to make sure they didn’t parrot Trump’s “sore loser” claims.

The network abruptly canceled Jeanine Pirro’s Nov. 7 show out of fear she would promote the claims of fraud. “They took her off cuz she was being crazy,” Tucker Carlson’s producer said privately at the time. “Optics are bad. But she is crazy.”

Then, Fox News called the race for Biden. The viewer rage that started with the early Arizona call on election night spiraled out of control. Ratings sunk, while executives and top stars started to panic, fueling a dynamic that allowed even facially crazy conspiracy theories about the election to fester on air.

Dominion executives sent countless emails to Fox leadership spelling out how the claims were false and begging them to put a stop to the smears. Still, figures like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell continued to appear on the air.

The appeals from Dominion didn’t win out, as Fox News employees were perhaps overwhelmed by the more frantic talk from executives about respecting the audience, a refrain that has by now become infamous. By respecting the audience, what Fox News meant was telling its viewers that the stolen election claims it knew to be false might actually be true.

“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make journalists do bad things,” said Bill Sammon. It was several weeks after election day in 2020, and Trump was still insisting, on the basis of no evidence, that the election had been stolen from him by Democrats. Sammon, the network’s longtime managing editor in Washington, was privately lamenting how those lies were making it onto the air night after night. Weeks later, Murdoch told leadership to fire Sammon and his political editor Chris Stirewalt, who defended the Arizona call on the air. The boss stated privately that the scalps would “be a big message with Trump people.”

Respecting the audience also meant keeping an eye on the hosts who spoke out against the claims. On Nov. 9, anchor Neil Cavuto cut short a press conference from then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, telling his audience:  “Whoa, whoa, whoa… She’s charging the other side is welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting, unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue showing this.”

At the time, Cavuto’s commentary, while true, was flagged internally as a “Brand Threat.” Months later, Fox hired McEnany as a host.

In another instance, Fox anchor Eric Shawn delivered an accurate fact check of bogus fraud claims that had been pushed on another show. Shawn’s segment prompted a rebuke from leadership, which deemed the internal conflict “bad business.”

What would end up being worse for the business than the fact checks was the Dominion lawsuit, which accused Fox of airing false claims about the company in an effort to support Trump’s claims the election was stolen, and ended costing Fox News a $787.5 million settlement, the largest known payout for a media outlet accused of defamation in history. They still face a defamation suit from Smartmatic, another voting tech company that was the subject of similar conspiracy theories.

Fox News quickly recovered as a business. The viewers that fled during the 2020 chaos have returned. As Fox Corp. chief Lachlan Murdoch boasted on a recent earnings call, the network has dominated this election. It continues to be the most-watched network in all of cable news and the second most-watched in all of television, behind only NBC, which aired the Summer Olympics. The network has expanded its audience of Democrats and Independents, and this election cycle was the only network to have on both 2024 candidates and their running mates in the same week.

Now, the network is taking measures to make sure their coverage doesn’t fall in to the same traps that ensnared them last time around.

This year, as in 2020, election night coverage will be helmed by veteran news anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, who will be joined by a team of reporters and analysts from the network’s news division, as well as some top opinion hosts, including Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters and Laura Ingraham.

The network has also tasked Eric Shawn – the anchor who sparked an internal panic by fact-checking false voting claims in 2020 – with handling “election integrity issues.”

“They’re going to play it really straight and very low key,” one former Fox News veteran predicted.

There’s also little appetite across the TV news industry to call a close race first, like Fox News did with Arizona four years ago, sparking the viewer revolt. One industry insider said few if any networks will be aggressive in calling states given how close the race is going to be and how high the stakes are for any outlet that gets it wrong.

Arnon Mishkin, who runs the Fox News decision desk, was asked in a recent interview with Politico whether he felt any pressure to be first in calling states. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think there’s a distinct pressure to be right – or, rather, not be wrong.”

“Aggressive race-calling is not a priority for the network,” the ex-Fox veteran said. “All the Trump supporters will watch them. There’s no ratings pressure. So they don’t have to be first. They don’t have to be anything. All they have to do is be on the air.”

What’s more, the network says they’ve put measures in place to avoid anchors being caught off guard by major calls, as happened with Arizona in 2020, when Bill Hemmer and Baier were surprised to see the state turn blue while live on air.

“One of the on-air people was talking and saying, ‘wait a second, did we just call Arizona or something?’” Mishkin told the Financial Times last week. “We’ve taken steps to make sure that sort of thing doesn’t happen.”

As for the possibility — or likelihood — that Trump cries fraud, Fox staffers are privately wary that promoting those claims will land them in trouble.

According to a new report by the Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr, Fox staffers attended throughout the fall a mandatory course on that instructed on defamation law, as well as “the importance of fact-checking, pushing back on potentially defamatory comments and always calling companies and individuals for comment.”

“It was very, very clear that they do not want a repeat of November 2020,” one journalist who participated in the course told the Post.

In recent weeks, some hosts have fact-checked Trump’s claims. Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner delivered a carefully-worded response to the former president calling the 2020 election “stolen” in remarks from his Mar-a-Lago resort.

“At the very beginning, you heard the former president talk about a stolen election,” Faulkner said. “And while he may feel a certain way, the facts remain Joe Biden was declared the winner with 51 percent of the vote.”

Earlier this year, Cavuto cut away from a Trump speech that touched on 2020 to say: “He still lost that election. That is not in doubt anymore. That’s not being debated anymore.” And Baier told Trump in a testy interview last year directly: “You lost the 2020 election.”

That doesn’t mean the network will avoid conspiracy theories entirely. For some inside Fox, alluding to vague election claims is apparently seen as a matter of self-preservation.

The sweet spot pleases the faction of your audience that demands election denialism but avoids defaming any person or company. Fox News host Greg Gutfeld has already claimed the race is “over,” and baselessly suggested “the integrity of the election is still in question.”

Maria Bartiromo recently cited the Gateway Pundit, a far-right fake news site, to push a conspiracy theory about an “election integrity problem” in Arizona.

This week, those companies that were the victims of election lies will be watching. Smartmatic said in a statement that it “has been preparing to monitor the US election coverage closely” and has “sent a letter to media outlets, providing direct contact information to facilitate any fact-checking or validation needs” as well as published “a dedicated fact-check page on our website to offer readily accessible, accurate information about our company and election technology.”

“We hope that media outlets and public figures—including influencers, politicians, and others—have come to recognize the profound societal costs of disinformation and its corrosive impact on public trust in democratic institutions,” a Smartmatic spokesperson said. “Our commitment to transparency and accuracy remains steadfast, and we strongly encourage responsible reporting to support and strengthen democracy.”

Dominion said it too is “closely monitoring claims around the 2024 election. We remain fully prepared to defend our company and our customers against lies and to seek accountability from those who spread them.”

Whether or not Fox News adopts a more responsible posture this year, I do wonder: Has the damage already been done?

I voted early this year. After filling out my paper ballot by hand, I fed it into a machine (“You can put it in whatever way,” said the helpful but stern poll worker) and walked over to the side of the church-cum-polling station to wait for a friend to finish up their civic duty.

There, I began chatting with a mild-mannered polling inspector, wearing a silk tie emblazoned with horse jockeys, who told me he was a Republican.

We started talking about the voting machines. I said I was impressed by the tech that allowed you to shoot your ballot in whatever way you wanted. I noticed “Dominion” emblazoned on the side of one of the sleek black boxes. The inspector frowned. He said he’s heard rumors that Dominion machines have been used to steal elections for decades and said he hoped they would be banned from use in American elections. I told him that, from what I knew, those claims had been investigated extensively and deemed to be untrue. He was unconvinced.

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