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Bush's Cousin Monitored Vote for Fox News
By JEFF LEEDS, Times Staff Writer

A cousin of George W. Bush played a key role in the election night decision
by Fox News Channel to call the race for the Texas governor, prompting the
cable channel to lead a stampede of networks in declaring Bush the president-elect.

John Ellis is a consultant hired by Fox to run its election night "decision
desk," the team that analyzes exit poll data and recommends when news
executives should project a winner in each state. The decision by Ellis'
desk to put Florida in Bush's win column at 2:16 a.m. EST made Fox the first
news outlet to call the presidential race. The other networks rushed to
follow over the next four minutes.

The current issue of New Yorker magazine says Ellis was on the phone with
Bush and his brother, Jeb, that evening, sharing internal data from the
network. In a letter to the magazine, however, Ellis denied that he was the
source of any improper leaks.

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.

Having Ellis in a position to share internal data and influence network
projections "certainly looks much too cozy and comfortable for a
journalistic organization," said Marvin Kalb, a former television reporter
and director of the Washington office of the Shorenstein Center on the
Press, Politics and Public Policy, where Ellis was a fellow in the early
1990s. "If you have internal data . . . you don't go around sharing that
information with the politicians."

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. "I doubt he'll be back in 2004," one insider said. "People are . . . livid."

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.

Ellis declined to comment Monday, saying only that he found questions about
his integrity "absolutely unconscionable."

In a letter he sent to the editor of the New Yorker this week, Ellis said,
"VNS prohibits member companies from sharing exit poll and sample precinct
data with non-authorized parties. 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."

He added that although he did speak to the Texas governor twice on election
day, he didn't reveal anything Bush didn't already know. He noted that Fox's
decision desk team included several Democrats.

Kathleen Frankovic, director of survey information for CBS News and a VNS
board member, said the early release of data raises "big, big questions . .
. about how it's used, is it accurate, and are people doing what we
promised we would not do?"