First reported in The New Yorker, but I can't find that article. It was an item in Talk of the Town.
http://dir.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/15/ellis/index.html
Fox guarding the henhouse
By hiring George Bush's cousin to run a crucial part of its election coverage, the right-wing Fox Network hits a new low in conflict of interest.
By Eric Boehlert
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November 15, 2000 | Why didn't the Fox News Channel hire George Will to man its Election Night Decision Desk? Or Peggy Noonan or William Safire? Hell, why not just go right to the source and hire George W. Bush himself?
These aren't rhetorical questions. Because Fox has made it perfectly clear that it sees nothing wrong with hiring an active George Bush partisan -- who also just happens to be his cousin -- to run a crucial part of its election desk.
John Ellis, a cousin of Bush, helped make the decision to finally (and erroneously) call Florida for Bush in the wee hours of Election Night. The call, the first by any network, created the false impression that Bush had won the general election. Ever since, the Bush camp has been playing the "we won" card; Fox's call made it a participant in the election, not merely an observer.
But the fact that it was a close relative of one of the candidates who helped make the call doesn't trouble Rupert Murdoch's right-wing cable network in the least. To the rest of the journalistic community, it may represent a new low in conflict of interest, but to Fox, hiring a man who recently wrote "I am loyal to my cousin, Governor George Bush of Texas. I put that loyalty ahead of my loyalty to anyone else outside my immediate family" is sound editorial policy. The only thing that troubles Fox is that Ellis, a vocal Clinton and Gore critic, violated company policy by swapping proprietary information with cousins George and Jeb (that stands for John Ellis Bush) in phone conversations on Election Night.
In an interview with the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, Ellis bragged about how he spent much of Election Night on the phone with his cousins talking strategies and exit-polling. Mayer deftly lets Ellis hang himself with his own self-important words: "At 2 a.m. Ellis called his cousins and told them, 'Our projection shows that it is statistically impossible for Gore to win Florida.' It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth -- me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool."
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