It was about 11.20pm on election night when Fox News made the call. The Democratic candidate had clinched a key swing state, a win that could set them on a path to be president of the United States.
In the Fox News studio, Karl Rove, conservative panelist and longtime Republican strategist, was apoplectic. Around the country, Republican supporters were bereft. Fox News launched an immediate inquisition into its own decision, but the network stood by the call.
Barack Obama had won Ohio, defeating Mitt Romney. Obama would be sworn in as president, for the second time, on 20 January 2013.
Fast forward eight years, and Fox News found itself in a strikingly similar position on 3 November 2020. The rightwing news channel was the first to call Arizona, which has gone blue once in the past 72 years, for Joe Biden.
Donald Trump and his campaign were furious, barraging the network with a series of phone calls in an attempt to get the decision overturned. The president’s supporters were upset too.
At protests outside a vote counting center in Phoenix, Arizona, a crowd chanted: “Fox News sucks!”, turning their ire on a channel whose hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity have spent the past four years praising Trump’s almost every move or utterance.
Now, in the tumultuous week following that Arizona call, Fox News, the most-watched cable news channel in America, has found itself in a sort of existential crisis.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
