Art Imitates Life in “Succession’s” Chilling Election Night Interference Episode
By J. Max Robins, May 16, 2023
Having dinner a few days ago at a roadside seafood joint in Carolina Beach, I was surprised to see Newsmax playing on the TV across from our booth. In these parts, you might expect to see Fox News; finding its current chief competitor airing was a first. Eric Bolling’s primetime nightly Newsmax show “The Balance” was on, with the ex-Fox News host slagging his former employer, while fawning over Donald Trump’s recent CNN town hall and the disruption it had caused inside that network. Paying my bill, I asked the owner of this family-owned place outside Wilmington, North Carolina, about his choice of channels. “Fox News betrayed us in 2020 with that early call for Biden in Arizona,” he told me. “It costs me $55 more a month for the cable package with Newsmax, but it’s worth it.”
Recent revelations coming out from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News have indicated how seriously the network’s supremo Rupert Murdoch and his stable of stars fretted about how that early call for Biden in a swing state had damaged their brand and sent loyal viewers, like the seafood shack owner, flocking to Newsmax and elsewhere. Addressing the fallout of Fox’s early Arizona call, Tucker Carlson wrote in a fevered text about needing “to do something to reassure our core audience,” because “they’re our whole business model.” What Carlson and his fellow Fox News stars did for months after the 2020 election was promote what they had privately admitted was a false narrative — that Trump had been robbed through mass voting fraud of a lease renewal at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
A couple of nights later, I watched the latest episode of “Succession,” which was centered on the internal machinations of a presidential election eve at “ATN,” the hit HBO series’ fictional stand-in for Fox News. I was struck by how the fictional drama mirrored the real news world, where top management bottom-line concerns so tragically often outweigh true fair and balanced journalism. Sadly, it’s a reality that I’ve been following since long before The Donald became the dominant profitable voice in presidential politics.
You only have to wander a couple of decades back to the hotly contested 2000 White House race where George W. Bush squared off against Al Gore. (This is back when “What are hanging chads” was a ‘Jeopardy!’ answer.) Much like on Sunday night’s art-imitates-life “Succession” episode, there were insidious internal pressures that went on inside Fox News, where Bush’s cousin, John Ellis, just so happened to be head of its election desk. Ellis was called out in the press for putting the heat on internally to prematurely file too-close-to-call Florida in the Bush column.
Early Call Pressure Echoed At NBC
That kind of insider bias might be standard operating procedure at right-leaning Fox News, yet something akin to it was also going on that historic night at NBC News. On the floor of the newsroom at 30 Rock, Jack Welch, the CEO of network parent company General Electric was putting heat on his own election desk to call Florida for Bush, according to multiple NBC insiders I spoke with at the time. Allegedly, Welch, a longtime big-bucks GOP donor, had been caught on video by a crew shooting the internal election night scene to be used later in promotional videos. In early 2021 Rep. Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat, began investigating whether Welch had forced NBC News to make the early Florida call for Bush. That summer, Waxman held hearings investigating the matter, getting little cooperation and repeated denials from Welch and his NBC News senior management. Frustrated, Waxman released a damning eight-page letter with evidence supporting the charges of election-night interference. Unfortunately, said letter was released on Sept. 10, 2001. Given what happened the following day, the charges became a media TV news footnote, buried beneath the tragedy of 9/11.
This week’s “Succession” episode brought to mind another Welch anecdote about his attendance at the NBC News-hosted 1988 presidential debate between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. It was a couple of years after GE had purchased the network, and the man known as Neutron Jack was questioning the purchase of the network, given its bottom-line challenges; that is, until a big idea hit him, as an NBC News exec later told me. “It was like a lightbulb went off — all puns intended. Jack looked around the room and saw just about every D.C. powerbroker in one room. There were guys there who were going to decide on all sorts of spending and regulatory issues affecting GE’s financial performance. After that, he knew buying NBC was a wise investment that he never looked back on.” Cue the “Succession” theme music.
Those fraught media memories of 2000 election interference came rushing back last week when CNN repeated the sins of the 2016 election cycle, chasing profits with — let’s call it what it is —the needless Donald Trump town “haul.” A couple of days later, Tucker Carlson announced he would take his hate-mongering schtick to fellow traveler Elon Musk’s Twitter. Last Friday, while feasting on fried fish in that southern Newsmax-loving seafood shack in purple North Carolina, I thought about a quote often attributed to the late cultural and political pundit H. L. Mencken: “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”
That adage was dramatically illustrated on “Succession” when brothers Kendall and Roman Roy, scions of the Murdoch-like media dynasty that controls ATN, decided to prematurely call the election for the ultra-right GOP candidate who had agreed to support their business interests. (Tellingly, the fictional presidential candidate’s last name is Mencken, and like his legendary namesake, he’s an outspoken opponent of representative democracy.) As in real life, power games at the top promoted a too-soon victory call, establishing a narrative in the hearts and minds of voters that’s next to impossible for the other side to dislodge, even if they have a credible case to make. What does that add up to? The kind of seafood shack favorite that news networks know will be enjoyed hook, line and sinker by a hungry right-leaning base. Just don’t skimp on the freedom fries.
J. Max Robins (@jmaxrobins) is executive director of the Center for Communication. He was formerly editor-in-chief of Broadcasting & Cable, and has contributed to many publications including the Wall Street Journal, Columbia Journalism Review and Forbes.
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The fictional drama in HBO’s “Succession” mirrors the real news world, where top management bottom-line concerns so tragically often outweigh true fair and balanced journalism. Sadly, it’s a reality that’s been happening since long before The Donald became the dominant profitable voice in presidential politics. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
