Martha MacCallum, Bret Baier Panicked Over Angering Trump Voters With Fox News’ Accurate 2020 Election Calls, According to Recorded Zoom Call

A new report goes into shocking detail about Fox News’ tailspin after the 2020 election, and how anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum panicked over the network’s ratings when their own analysts correctly determined Donald Trump was on track to lose.

The New York Times obtained a recording of a Zoom call held shortly after the election between Baier, MacCallum, Fox News Chief Executive Suzanne Scott, and Fox President Jay Wallace. The call also included Bill Sammon, Fox News’ senior vice president and managing editor in Washington, and Arnon Mishkin, the director of the Decision Desk.

The purpose of the call was to address the backlash Fox News received at the time for being the first major outlet to call Arizona for President Joe Biden. Despite the fact that the call was correct, Scott and Wallace were fretting about the network’s ratings if conservative viewers revolted against the network by turning them off or switching to competitors like Newsmax.

“Listen, it’s one of the sad realities,” Scott reportedly said. “If we hadn’t called Arizona, those three or four days following Election Day, our ratings would have been bigger. The mystery would have been still hanging out there.”

This led to Baier and MacCallum making the reported suggestion that Fox News should consider viewer reactions when calling states, rather than base their coverage purely on their own (correct) calculations.

“In a Trump environment,” said MacCallum, “The game is just very, very different.”

Baier was also in the thick of this, reportedly suggesting that Fox News “pull” their call for Arizona.

From the Times:

Ms. Scott was among the executives who grew alarmed after the network’s Decision Desk called Arizona for Mr. Biden at 11:20 p.m. on election night on Nov. 3, 2020, a projection that infuriated Mr. Trump and his aides because it was a swing state that could foreshadow the overall result. No other network called Arizona that night, although The Associated Press did several hours later, and the Fox journalists who made the call stood by their judgment.

At 8:30 the next morning, Ms. Scott suggested Fox not call any more states until certified by authorities, a formal process that could take days or weeks. She was talked out of that. But the next day, with Mr. Biden’s lead in Arizona narrowing, Mr. Baier noted that Mr. Trump’s campaign was angry and suggested reversing the call. “It’s hurting us,” he wrote Mr. Wallace and others in a previously reported email. “The sooner we pull it even if it gives us major egg. And put it back in his column. The better we are. In my opinion.”

That email was previously reported in Peter Baker’s book on the 2020 election, and Baier offered a statement on it months ago:

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.

The report delves further into the Fox News team’s collision with executives about appeasing their audience and the network’s reluctance to call more states for Biden. In the lead-up to the Zoom call, Scott reportedly complained that Sammon “did not understand ‘the impact to the brand and the arrogance in calling AZ’ and it was his job ‘to protect the brand.””

More from the Times:

On Nov. 16, Ms. Scott and Mr. Wallace convened the Zoom meeting to discuss the Arizona decision. Mr. Sammon and Arnon Mishkin, the director of the Decision Desk, were included. Chris Stirewalt, the political editor who had gone on air to defend the call, was not.

Ms. Scott invited Mr. Baier and Ms. MacCallum, “the face” of the network, as she called them, to describe the heat they were taking, according to the recording reviewed by The Times.

“We are still getting bombarded,” Mr. Baier said. “It became really hurtful.” He said projections were not enough to call a state when it would be so sensitive. “I know the statistics and the numbers, but there has to be, like, this other layer” so they could “think beyond, about the implications.”

Ms. MacCallum agreed: “There’s just obviously been a tremendous amount of backlash, which is, I think, more than any of us anticipated. And so there’s that layer between statistics and news judgment about timing that I think is a factor.” For “a loud faction of our viewership,” she said, the call was a blow.

The conversation went on with Sammon and Scott disputing the Arizona call, with Sammon pointing out that the call “held up” — Biden did, in fact, win Arizona — while Scott countered, “I think we’re living in a new world in a sense, where half of the voting population doesn’t believe in big corporations, big tech, big media.”

“There’s a lack of trust,” she said. “And when they feel like things are being done behind closed doors in rooms that they can’t understand, it exacerbates the emotion and how they feel about the process.”

In the aftermath, Sammon’s contract with Fox was not renewed, and Stirewalt was also dismissed amid the network’s “restructuring.” Fox News offered Mediaite this statement regarding their call for Arizona:

FOX News stood by the Arizona call despite intense scrutiny. Given the extremely narrow 0.3% margin and a new projection mechanism that no other network had, of course there would be a wide-ranging postmortem surrounding the call and how it was executed no matter the candidates.

The Zoom call details come while Fox News remains under major legal scrutiny over the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit they face from Dominion Voting Systems. Aside from airing conspiratorial 2020 election claims that were denounced as “crazy” by Rupert Murdoch, filings from the lawsuit have revealed a number of unflattering revelations about Fox News’ hosts, plus Murdoch’s admission that they could’ve done more to push back on false election claims.

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