Today, Explained - Fox & Frenemies

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

After a fraught Election Week, cable news is finally cutting away from President Trump’s falsehoods. Erik Wemple, media critic for the Washington Post, explains why it might not last. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Okay, hot take. Cable news is bad for your brain. They got to fill 24 hours a day. And we found out the hard way what that means when you've got a president who says reckless stuff just about 24 hours a day. But something strange has been happening in the past few days on the American cable news networks. They have been cutting away from the guy who lies. We're going to talk about the significance of that on today's show,

but we're going to start with a look at how they handled election week. Because if you were watching as our guest Eric Wemple from the Washington Post was, it was impossible to miss just how much power the cable news networks have over our democracy. Well, they certainly have power over our emotions. All right, stand by. We have a key race alert right now. New numbers have just come in. That's where we begin with a CNN key race alert. Key race alert. You may be exaggerating just a little bit because, of course, they're not county boards of elections. But since the county boards of elections are so slow in county and certifying votes,

the networks historically have stepped in to make these calls on races once they feel they have sufficient data. It's official now. NBC projects Florida goes to President Donald Trump. And they spend months and months and months modeling turnout and results for swing states. And that's basically why we tune into the networks on election night, is to see how those swing states are going. It's really, really kind of a unique part of United States media because nobody else really does it. The networks have kind of a monopoly on this situation where they model everything out and they forecast

and then they make calls. As my colleague Andrew Prokop told me on Friday when Vox and its election partner Decision Desk called Biden the winner, calling these races is more of an art than a science. Prokop is right that it is more of an art than a science. Procop is right that it's more of an art than a science. If it were a science, you know, everybody would be out there, you know, with their programs and they'd be doing it on their own computer, reaching their own conclusions. But you see the way it's sort of bifurcated now.

The AP and Fox News have their own little partnership. And that partnership is with the University of Chicago. They do all these surveys, like 140,000 surveys across all the states. ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN have something else, which is called the National Election Pool, which relies heavily on exit polls and is done in coordination with Edison Research. And they get really a lot of the data from these partnerships. And once the data comes flowing in, when one candidate no longer has a path to election,

they call it for the other one. They do weight things differently, and that's where the art versus the science comes in. There's no uniform, widely accepted formula for figuring out who's going to win Wisconsin. But it really is heavily quantitative. You can't just wing it. Have the networks ever gotten it wrong? Has anyone ever called the wrong state for the wrong candidate? Well, yes.

I mean, back in 2000. Stand by. Stand by. The news by CNN right now is moving our earlier declaration of Florida back to the too close to call column. The 2000 recount and the fiasco on election night serves as the entire point of reference for where we are now. That was a complete fiasco because they called Florida, then uncalled Florida, and then nobody had any idea where Florida was. And so they brought all the heads of the networks up on Capitol Hill. Since 1990, when the first joint polling and projection effort began, we've been involved in nearly 900 elections around the nation. The methods that we use to project winners in those races have only been wrong once before.

In other words, we've been right 99.8% of the time. Unfortunately, when you make a mistake as glaring as calling Al Gore the winner in Florida, the number of times you've been right seems less relevant. Another big failure, of course, was the 2016 exit polling and the regular election polling, which made people feel less comfortable in their assumptions and in their data and the degree to which they understood the electorate. Now we had a huge polling problem this year as well, where many of the swing states were way off, you know, beyond the margin of error. So, I mean, there have been a lot of failures. So I think that over time,

these network producers have become more humble about the ability of these experts to sort of figure out what the country is thinking. But once CNN did make the call on Saturday morning, it seemed like the whole world fell in line almost within, what, 20 minutes. It was MSNBC. Biden is being called.

Fox News. The Fox News decision desk can now project that former Vice President Joe Biden will win Pennsylvania and Nevada. New York Times honking in the streets. Champagne sold out in Washington, D.C. It was eerie to me. Was it not eerie to you? I mean, they're like, oh, well, we all reached the same conclusion

at exactly the same time. I mean, that's just bullshit, right? Yeah. I mean, you would have to suppose that they all shared the model, right? They all shared the model and that they all reached the same conclusion at the same time. To me, it was like, oh, man, this is not a good look, right? Like if this were really independent, you would have CNN like calling in on Saturday at 11 and then maybe NBC would reach the same conclusion at 7 p.m. that evening or something.

And one or two of them would still be stragglers out there right now. But no, it's all over in 20 minutes. That to me struck me as really like, oh man, you know, this really is a mirage. This is the third mirage. There was the red mirage, the blue mirage, and then the network mirage. And it might not be helping matters as the outgoing guy is doing everything he can to make Americans doubt the veracity of these election calls. I think you're on to something here. This is really an idiosyncratic part of the way we run our country. The networks are sitting there with this process that everybody hangs on. And we don't have really an analog to it in other parts of our civic life, you know, where so much trust and confidence is being placed

in the ability of these networks to figure out before the counties certify their vote what's going to happen. And I think that over the past two decades, since 2000, the networks have come to grips with just how important it is and just how much power is vested in them. And so I think that's why it took until Saturday at 11.24, whenever it was, for them to take this step. Every time we got a new vote, it just reaffirmed that that was the pattern. And the idea that Trump is going to overturn this with provisional ballots that are, you know, we can already see have quite a few Democrats in them that traditionally are extremely Democratic. The idea that Donald Trump is

suddenly going to win 96 percent of that vote or something like that, you know, is just the implausibility, I think, just finally reached the critical threshold. I would like to ask all the assembled network heads right now, why is it that you all clustered around 10 or 15 minutes to make one of the most important calls, you know, in modern American history, and you all say that you have different proprietary approaches to calling the elections? It just, on some level, doesn't make a lot of sense. After the break, Fox and Frenemies. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket.

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. but what is this happening here why is arizona blue did we just call it did we make a call in arizona arizona 11 electoral votes yes okay time out this is a big development yeah the fox news decision desk is calling arizona for joe b. Eric, let's talk about the moment Fox News emphasis on news, not those opinion dudes who dominate primetime. But let's talk about the moment that Fox News kind of broke up with Donald Trump. It starts with their calling Arizona for Joe Biden, right?

Yes, that was 1120 on Tuesday night that Fox called Arizona and basically threw a big stink bomb in all of the places where Trump and his buddies were pretty much celebrating, high-fiving. How did President Trump react to the Fox News call? Trump reacted viciously, as did his inner circle. They all pounded Fox News to retract the call. And this is what you're getting at, Sean. This is a perfect example of what you're getting at. Why on earth, think about this, why on earth really would they care what the hell Fox News says about Arizona? Ultimately, Arizona is going to decide the vote, right? Unless you believe that somehow Fox News is in the counting room

and, you know, making decisions of its own, or that the county board of elections has moved its offices to Fox News on Avenue of the Americas in New York City, then it makes no sense. But they all pressured Fox to retract this. It made for one of the most dramatic moments of the night as Fox decision desk director Arnon Mishkin came under fire. We're getting a lot of incoming here

and we need you to answer some questions. I'm sorry, the president is not going to be able to take over and win enough votes to eliminate that seven point lead. It shows that PR is a big part of this, and the other part of it is the degree of ownership that the Trump people feel over Fox News. I mean, after all, if Hannity is basically doing your propaganda for four or five years, you start to feel as though you own him, right? I mean, really. And so that's what, in my view, this nasty reaction really showed is that they feel they own Fox News. And that was just the beginning of the fissure between the outgoing guy and the news people over at Fox? I mean, there's talk of this great fissure, but Trump has hated certain parts of Fox News for, you know, ever since Megyn Kelly asked him

about his sexism back in August 2015. Yeah. So, you know, he has been invading against, you know, the parts of Fox News that have integrity for five years. And that includes the polling unit, now the decision desk, and, you know, Shep Smith, and all these people who decide that when they get up in the morning, they're going to try their best to tell the truth, and Trump can't abide it. So Trump has been attacking these people for a really long time. And this is merely a continuation of that. I would hate to sit here and assign more

significance to this moment than any other. It's just kind of interesting. And you'll always have Hannity and Tucker, but there is significance here because these networks, including Fox, have finally started to cut away from the president when he's spreading BS. I mean, this starts with his speech Thursday night. This speech was a Thursday night and it occurred during the evening news. So they dipped into it and then they saw after about five to seven minutes, how he was lying so much, which was entirely predictable. And all three of the networks bailed. One after five minutes, the other two after like seven minutes. But each, you know, to see the way they cut away, in one instance, Trump was saying, I won Georgia by a lot. A lot. Likewise in Georgia, I won by a lot. A lot.

And I think that was when CBS said, all right, we're out of here. And there, the president of the United States addressing the American people for the first time. Nancy Cordes is with us. There were a couple of statements that the president made. Do you have a fact check? Yes, on a number of fronts, Nora. They had to basically clean up for the guy, you know, over the next five to seven minutes. And it really is a big job, you know,

when you let Trump loose on your airwaves. He creates so many messes, you know? It's like your eight-year-old making cookies, you know? And so the less time you let him run loose on the airwaves, the easier time you have making a more accurate broadcast. And, you know, my argument is that this guy forfeited his privilege of being live on the airwaves many, many years ago. You know, and it's funny you say that because The Onion had a headline after that

cutaway from MSNBC that said something like, major networks cut away from Donald Trump four years ago when he starts lying. You know, they've been doing it for four years. They've been letting him lie. CNN seems especially on the hook on that front. I mean, why did they let it go on for so long? He's been lying the whole time. There are a couple of reasons in my view.

One is it's simply much more difficult to tape a presidential address, fact check it, then produce a package that you present to your audience later. That's a lot of work, okay? It's much easier to just let the guy go, to seat your panel, have them watch and listen, and then just talk about it later, right? That is so much easier. So I'm not in favor of letting Trump speak live, but that's not to say that I favor suppressing the news. In other words, I don't want news outlets to suppress the fact that this happened.

I just think there's a responsible way to report on it. And the other consideration is ratings. When he does this stuff, he's a substitute for actual news programming. And it makes money. It makes money. You're absolutely right. You're 100% right. It makes money.

And in the realm of cable news, there is only one metric, just audience. That really is how they keep score. And so it's really important to understanding why they allow Trump for so long to go live unfiltered. And now, if you want to be cynical, you can look at the network's willingness to cut away from Donald Trump or his White House press secretary, as Fox News did this week. We want every legal vote to be counted and we want every illegal vote. Well, I just think we have to be very clear that 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 you this.

I want to make sure that as an acknowledgement that this era is coming to an end, we have president elect Joe Biden. We need to figure out a way to move on from Donald Trump. There's less on the line if we cut away from him. Does that mean that nothing was actually learned here that that they waited until he no longer had a political future to finally start cutting away from him? I think it is kind of pathetic is what you're getting at. We make the call that he's no longer going to be president, and then we decide that we're going to start getting aggressive on his falsehoods on live TV. I think that's not a great sequence if you're trying to run a network that's vested with integrity and responsibility. But I think on some level, it is an admission that they've screwed this up for a really long time.

But I will say, too, that I wouldn't want to be in the position of being the network head and having to deal with a president who not only lies but who also gets on TV all the time. It is not a simple and easy situation. But I do think at some level, at some point, like after a few months of this, there really is no excuse for not taking really strong corrective action. And now we're looking at a Biden presidency, which promises to be a lot more conventional and maybe a lot more blissfully boring than its predecessor. What's that going to do to TV news? I would be shocked if the ratings don't go through the floor.

I think CNN, I think MSNBC are going to be gasping for air. I really do. I think CNN is finally going to have to start using some of its correspondence. It has all like 3,000 news professionals in CNN. Why don't we get on the daytime rotation stories about climate change, stories about racial justice, stories about, you know, stuff that really matter instead of just hanging out at the White House all day? So I think actually it may be a nice refreshing break from, you know, one-sided, one-theme

coverage the whole time. A fact that's not lost on President Trump, right? For all his falsehoods and disinformation, he's always said, the networks love me. I'm great for the networks. I make them a ton of money. 100%. 100%. He's incredibly conscious of his ability to boost ratings. In fact, I think that's been the primary motivator of his entire presidency. That's what he really cares about. And that's why I think that one night when they had the dueling town halls and Biden's town hall beat him in the ratings was so incredibly devastating for him. So yeah, it'll be different.

Eric Wemple is a media critic at The Washington Post. I'm Sean Ramos for him. It's Today Explained.