The disclosures are raising questions of impropriety at Fox, which has promoted itself as a counterweight to the supposedly liberal bias in the national media. Roger Ailes, a top strategist in the 1988 and 1992 campaigns for former President Bush, is chairman of Fox News. If you have internal data . Fox officials said the final decision to declare Bush the winner was made by John Moody, vice president for news, who oversaw Ellis' analysis unit. But Fox executives were furious over Ellis' alleged leaking of information to Bush.
People are . . .
One executive at the network said Ellis' conduct was considered a violation of Fox's promise to keep exit poll data confidential. Exit poll secrecy has long been a sore point for the networks, which jointly finance a consortium called Voter News Service, which interviews voters leaving polling booths and supplies the survey data to its members starting at 1 p.m. EST on election day. Armed with the data, each network must decide for itself when it can accurately predict how a state will vote. The decision to call Bush the winner in Florida was a mistake and a historic embarrassment for the national media that all of the major TV networks were forced to retract. Although the information leaks out anyway, I and the other members of the Fox News Channel Decision Desk Team obeyed this guideline zealously, precisely because of my relationship with Governor Bush.