NEW YORK - It's 3 p.m. on Super Tuesday, and from the bowels of a cramped war room crammed with computers, John Ellis makes a conference call to more than a dozen Fox News staffers. The commodity he has is the precious currency of political junkies and highly competitive news outlets - exit poll results.
Ellis, a consultant, writer, and former Globe columnist (and cousin of George W. Bush) starts the rough state-by-state rundown. In Georgia, Al Gore leads Bill Bradley by an 8-2 margin and Bush has a 2-1 lead over John McCain; in Vermont it's Gore and McCain by 6-4 margins; in Ohio, it's Gore by 7-3 and Bush by 6-4; in Connecticut and Maine, the GOP primary is too close to call.
But ''if you're a Bradley fund-raiser,'' he announces with some finality, ''you give up.''
While foreshadowing the day's winners and losers, Ellis, who is running Fox's exit poll operation, is not parceling out the actual point spreads between the candidates. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that exit poll numbers - and the premature leaking of them - has become one of the big media flaps of this campaign season.
It started when the online magazine Slate (www.slate.com) posted New Hampshire primary exit polls on election day afternoon, assailing the ''elite'' media's agreement to keep them from the public until after the polls close as a pa ternalistic charade. (The exit polls are provided by the Voter News Service, a consortium that includes ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, and the Associated Press.)
In subsequent primaries, the exit poll taboo has been shattered by the National Review Web site (www.nationalreview.
com) and the Drudge Report (www.drudge
report.com). And the media debate has raged. On the same day that Washington Post polling director Richard Morin wrote a column criticizing the ''self-aggrandizing 'Net journalists'' who spilled the exit poll beans, a Post editorial defend ed Slate's decision as legitimate journalistic inquiry.
Last month, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes warn ed staffers to keep exit poll results to themselves and reiterat ed Fox's policy not to ''broadcast, publish or disseminate outcome projections'' based on exit poll data before poll closings.
Sitting in his office Tuesday, preparing for his network's crucial election night coverage, Ailes says that Fox News Channel is ''in the game. For a new network, a brand new network, we're highly competitive.''
On election night, being highly competitive in the news game not only means being prepared to call primary elections the second the polls close, but to use a clever choreography of cues and code to suggest the outcome even before they close.
Shortly before 4 p.m., Fox News executive producer Marty Ryan stops by Ellis's operation for a briefing. Bush is slated for an 8:40 p.m. interview with Fox News managing editor Brit Hume, and Ellis and Ryan figure that by then, the network will be able to call the winner in at least seven primaries. The team already knows that Bush has won in Georgia, Ohio, Maryland, Missouri, and among California's Republican voters.
By the time Bush's Fox interview rolls around, Ellis promises, ''he'll be in a good mood.''
At 5 p.m., Ellis heads upstairs to a conference room to meet with Fox News executives and on-air talent - Hume, Paula Zahn, Morton Kondracke, Fred Barnes, Tony Snow, and Michael Barone. He stresses the states where the GOP primary is still too tough to call: Maine, New York, and Rhode Island. As for the California ''beauty contest,'' which features a nonbinding popular vote, he offers a solemn warning. There may be no victor until the wee hours of the morning.
Still, a consensus has formed. It's a big night for Bush. And just as Hume begins his 6 p.m. Fox News Channel election special - one hour before the early polls close - he says Bush and Gore ''seemed poised to all but end the races in both parties.''
Quickly, the news gets worse for McCain. Snow reveals some of the telling nonhorse-race results in the exit polls. McCain's unfavorable ratings are going up and so is the perception that he was launching unfair attacks on Bush. Traveling with Bush, correspondent Carl Cameron says the governor will deliver ''a victory speech tonight.'' Fox's David Shuster, in the McCain camp, paints a gloomier picture.
At one point, Hume asks whether a ''victorious Bush [can] count on the many voters who supported McCain. '' By a few minutes after 6 p.m., without calling a single winner in a single state, Hume and company have effectively interred McCain.
At 6:50 p.m., an ''Alert'' flashes on the screen announcing that Fox News will call the Georgia and Vermont primaries at 7 p. m. The rest of the day's preparation pays off as the dominoes fall. At 7:30 sharp, Fox calls Ohio for Bush followed a half-hour later by calls for Bush in Missouri and Maryland and for McCain in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Five minutes later, a too-close-to-call state has finally tipped. It's Maine for Bush.
At 8:40 p.m., Bush, now his party's presumptive nominee, begins his interview with Hume from Austin, Texas.
''First and foremost, I'm really proud of what we've done tonight,'' Bush declares. Like Ellis predicted five hours earlier, the governor is in a good mood.
