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http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/15/ellis/index.html
VAST RIGHT-WING NETWORK
JEB = JOHN ELLIS BUSH
Fox guarding the henhouse
By hiring George Bush's cousin to run a crucial part of its
election coverage, the right-wing Fox Network hits a new low
in conflict of interest.
By Eric Boehlert
Nov. 15, 2000 | Why didn't the Fox News Channel hire
George Will to man its Election Night Decision Desk? Or
Peggy Noonan or William Safire? Hell, why not just go right to
the source and hire George W. Bush himself?
These aren't rhetorical questions. Because Fox has made it
perfectly clear that it sees nothing wrong with hiring an active
George Bush partisan -- who also just happens to be his cousin
-- to run a crucial part of its election desk.
John Ellis, a cousin of Bush, helped make the
decision to finally (and erroneously) call
Florida for Bush in the wee hours of Election
Night. The call, the first by any network,
created the false impression that Bush had
won the general election. Ever since, the
Bush camp has been playing the "we won"
card; Fox's call made it a participant in the
election, not merely an observer.
But the fact that it was a close relative of one
of the candidates who helped make the call
doesn't trouble Rupert Murdoch's right-wing
cable network in the least. To the rest of the journalistic
community, it may represent a new low in conflict of interest,
but to Fox, hiring a man who recently wrote "I am loyal to my
cousin, Governor George Bush of Texas. I put that loyalty
ahead of my loyalty to anyone else outside my immediate
family" is sound editorial policy. The only thing that troubles
Fox is that Ellis, a vocal Clinton and Gore critic, violated
company policy by swapping proprietary information with
cousins George and Jeb (that stands for John Ellis Bush) in
phone conversations on Election Night.
In an interview with the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, Ellis
bragged about how he spent much of Election Night on the
phone with his cousins talking strategies and exit-polling.
Mayer deftly lets Ellis hang himself with his own self-important
words: "At 2 a.m. Ellis called his cousins and told them, 'Our
projection shows that it is statistically impossible for Gore to
win Florida.' It was just the three of us guys handing the phone
back and forth -- me with the numbers, one of them a
governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool."
It was also a violation of company policy. The data Ellis was
reportedly swapping with the Bush camp (post-New Yorker,
he now denies it) came from Voter News Service, a
media-backed consortium that gathers crucial, hush-hush
voting information on Election Day. According to a Boston
Globe news report during the primary season, "Fox News
chairman Roger Ailes warned staffers to keep exit poll results
to themselves and reiterated Fox's policy not to 'broadcast,
publish or disseminate outcome projections' based on exit poll
data before poll closings."
Ailes, of course, is the former Republican political
image-maker who in his earlier incarnation coached George W.
Bush's father.
On Monday, when the New Yorker hit newsstands, Fox
News vice president John Moody admitted that Ellis had erred,
but defended hiring him, suggesting it would have been unfair
not to hire him simply because of who he was related to -- a
remarkably genial interpretation of conflict of interest. By
Tuesday, after the revelations of Ellis' information-trading,
Moody came down harder, saying that Fox was pondering
disciplinary action against Ellis for misusing his position of
power at the channel.
Since Ellis was working for Fox as a consultant on a 30-day
contract, that point seems moot.
But Ellis isn't just a Bush cousin who happens to work in
television and stumbled into an awkward position on Election
Night. He's a former Gingrich foot soldier, a raging partisan
who is steeped in the Clinton-hating tradition of the far right.
(That's something the Los Angeles Times, Associated Press,
New York Times and even the New Yorker itself have failed
to report in recent days.) Fox, of course, knew that.
The cable network describes Ellis as a "number cruncher." But
that bland description doesn't exactly fit the Republican
attack-dog columns Ellis penned during most of the '90s for the
Boston Globe, and more recently for the New York Press.
To Ellis, President Clinton is an "amoral"
"sexual predator" who occupies "a morally
berserk universe." Under Clinton's depraved
leadership, Ellis wrote, America faces a grim
fate: "It will get worse before it gets better,
because the truth is, it will never get better
until Bill Clinton is gone."
There wasn't a flimsy Clinton-hating
conspiracy that Ellis didn't sign onto --
Chinese spying, Whitewater, Vince Foster,
hush money. Watch here as Ellis goes
0-for-6 in just one Clinton-bashing
paragraph: "He lied about Whitewater. He lied about Castle
Grande. He lied about the firing of the White House travel
office personnel. He lied about his staff's mishandling of FBI
files. He lied about the circumstances surrounding the suicide of
White House counsel Vince Foster. He lied about a vast White
House effort to hush up former assistant attorney general and
convicted felon Webster Hubbell."
As the Monica Lewinsky story began to break, Ellis was
positively breathless in that Matt Drudge kind of way: "The end
could come with astonishing speed. Senior Democratic Party
officials were already beginning to speak of how they might
execute the president's departure. It's over. Clinton is finished.
The rest is endgame."
One week later, more of Ellis' keen prognostication was on
display: "There are reports all over Washington that Clinton is
planning to fire Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. More
shoes are expected to drop in the various Clinton
investigations."
Ellis wasn't above using his columns to flak for his cousin,
either. Marveling at Bush's reelection win in Texas, Ellis (who
usually informed readers about his family connection), wrote,
"The scope of Bush's victory left seasoned professionals in
awe." It certainly seemed to leave Ellis in awe, as evidenced by
the following heart-drenched effusion: "Bush loves his life. He
loves his wife and daughters. He loves his family and friends.
He loves his job. He loves his home. He loves Texas, a state
that is a nation unto itself. When he wakes up in the morning,
he can hardly wait to get to work."
Fox News execs say they didn't hire Ellis because of his
"bloodline." They must not have hired him for his political
foresight, either, because his crystal-ball record is abysmal.
On the eve of the '98 congressional elections, Ellis, like every
other GOP true believer, was confident that "Clinton is to the
Democratic Party what the Titanic was to its passengers. He's
taking everybody down with him." Wrong. Fed up with the
impeachment hearings, voters dealt the GOP a humiliating
blow.
Hillary's Senate campaign in New York? "She will not win
because her candidacy isn't about New York, or the people
who live here, or what she might do for them. It's about her.
The moment New Yorkers collectively understand this -- that
they're being used -- will be the moment that her candidacy
curdles. What might have been 'you go girl' will become 'just
go away.'"
Imagine how Ellis felt working the Fox News Decision Desk
when it had to call the New York Senate race as a lopsided
win for the first lady.
As for Gore, Ellis wrote this summer that he was a "goner," that
his advisors would never allow the vice president to select a
Jewish running mate, and that, barring a dramatic shift, there
was "no Electoral College math that works" for him.
So let's get this straight. Fox hired a partisan Bush cousin --
who thinks Gore's campaign practiced "stupid politics," that
Hillary Clinton is "immoral" and her husband "loathsome" -- to
run a crucial part of its election coverage. He spent Election
Night on the phone with the Republican candidate and his
closest advisors reportedly swapping embargoed voting data.
And he was able, through his flawed call of Florida, to create
the false impression that Bush had won the election.
Who needs a vast right-wing conspiracy when you've got a
vast right-wing network?
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