My first meeting in Roger Ailes’ boardroom of doom was on Election Day 2010.

At the time, I was the network’s new political editor. Republicans were poised to deliver a serious walloping to President Barack Obama and roll back the Democrats’ doughty majorities in both houses of Congress. The GOP was in a position to score major wins in governors’ mansions and statehouses from coast to coast.

The second floor of the News Corp headquarters on Sixth Avenue in New York was a hive of excited optimism. With Republicans looking forward to big wins, we knew viewership would be enormous that night. I was invited to the regular afternoon executive meeting for the first time so I could lay out the expectations we had on the Decision Desk and the politics team for what would transpire that night. I had only been with the company for about four months, and I was sweating it hard as I sat there at the far end from Ailes at a conference table roughly the size of a World War II aircraft carrier. The meeting was packed. Not only were executives from New York crowding in, but people like my boss Bill Sammon, who would have ordinarily joined the afternoon meeting by phone, were attending in person.

It felt like a steam bath in there, and I was running on about two hours of sleep and too many energy drinks. I had been up all night finishing the cards that we would use on the desk and the anchors would use on-air for quick reference guides on each race. They all had to be perfect (they still weren’t), but I couldn’t make my colleagues look foolish quoting my bad data. Plus, these were the five-inch by eight-inch little life rafts that I could hold on to as I tried to run the rapids of the many, many calls we were going to have to make that night. How many Republican votes in 2004 in Ozaukee County? When did the incumbent win his first term? What did the last polls say? Didn’t her husband used to have that seat?

After four straight days and nights of data obsession and rehearsals, I had to now appear to be a normal human in front of a room full of New Yorkers to whom I assume I appeared to be a sweaty bumpkin.

By the way, TV networks rehearse election nights with dummy numbers. The Decision Desk makes calls based on the pretend results to simulate the workflow and pinch points of the big night. If you’re making 100 calls, the hours between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. are bound to be chaotic. Then the election night team uses the practice calls to test the graphics, lighting, anchor and guest positions, and communications. After six cycles of working with that crew at Fox, we really learned how to make it hum by the end of my time at the network. But in 2010, I was clueless.

In this Sept. 29, 2006 photo, former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes poses at Fox News in New York.

Jonathan Ernst/AP Photo

The irony for Fox was that the call that so infuriated Trump and so many viewers was possible only because Rupert Murdoch had four years earlier yanked Fox out of the consortium of other networks paying for exit polls. He sure wasn’t wrong. The exit polls were bad and getting worse.

So Arnon & Company built a better mousetrap, and that was even before we found out that the coronavirus pandemic would increase the share of mail-in ballots by as much as 50 percent. You can’t do an exit poll if nobody is exiting the polls, so while our competitors were scrambling to put together a system to accommodate the change, we had already tested our superior product in the 2018 midterms. It turned out to be a capability that the network would regret developing.

Amid the geyser of anger in the wake of the Arizona call, Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, called for my firing and accused me of a “cover-up.” Covering up what, exactly? We didn’t have any ballots to count and we didn’t have any electoral votes to award. We were just some guys with a cool computer, lots of polling data, and a lot of nicotine gum and coffee. But if you’ve been living comfortably in the climate-controlled emotions of post-journalism, when the real thing comes along, it’s a shock to the system.

There are lots of books and articles that talk about how the news media is hurting select groups: Republicans or Democrats or populists or minority groups or the family or whatever suits you. But that kind of blame-casting just alienates us further, replicating the core defect of the news media that critics are attacking. There is no trophy for being more harmed by our lazy, alienating press.

We’re all losers in this one.

The cover of Broken News, by Chris Stirewalt, from which this article is adapted.

Excerpted from Broken News: How the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Backby Chris Stirewalt. Copyright (C) 2022. Available from Center Street, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.