Fox News’s Decision Desk Director Arnon Mishkin called Arizona for President Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election. Despite the backlash from some, the network plans to bring him back for their coverage of the 2022 and 2024 elections, per The Hollywood Reporter.
During the 2020 election, President Biden won Arizona by merely a percentage point, becoming the first Democrat to win the state in over 20 years.
However, Mishkin’s decision to call the race didn’t sit well with the Trump administration. As a result, campaign members reportedly conducted operatives to call the network directly and request them to rescind the call.
“Suzanne and I don’t have those relationships with [the Trump] White House. We weren’t sitting there hemming and hawing over Arizona. At the time, it was just another state,” Fox News president Jay Wallace said
“It wasn’t until the next day that we really started to get this amazing heartburn coming in, a lot of it generated by the White House. That was the start of a long week. But I have to say, Suzanne could not have been more supportive of the [Arizona] call. And we stuck with it.”
The following week, Fox News media correspondent Howard Kurtz reported Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, reached out to the network’s owner Rupert Murdoch to express his displeasure about Mishkin’s call of Arizona.
Members of the Trump campaign published a statement denouncing Mishkin as a “[Hillary] Clinton-voting, Biden-donating Democrat.”
Eduardo Razo is the Assistant Content Editor for BNM, which includes writing daily news stories on the news media industry. He can be found on Twitter @eddierazo_ or you can reach him by email at eddie1991razo@gmail.com.
