Fox News call 'shattered' repeat dream

Donald Trump was in a tizz after Fox News announced that Joe Biden had won Arizona. He rang network owner Rupert Murdoch, screaming and furiously demanding a retraction, reports said.

But the 89-year-old media mogul refused to order his staff to retract the Arizona call.

Within the network - which many see as a Republican Party backer - the decision to announce the Arizona result was greeted with anger, reports said.

"We called it long before MSNBC!'' one outraged staff on the opinion side told magazine Vanity Fair.

"We were so worried about being seen as pro-Trump that we bent over backward."

Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser, accused Fox News of "voter suppression,'' acting to deliberately discourage Trump supporters from bothering to vote.

"Fox News committed news malpractice and voter suppression," he said.

"There's got to be a change there or there will be major consequences."

Fox News' decision to call Arizona meant that they gave Biden a higher tally of electoral college votes than rival CNN at that time.

With Florida looking red early on Tuesday night, Trump and his advisers thought they were witnessing a repeat of election night 2016, when a victory in Florida foreshadowed a victory over all.

That mirage of victory was pierced when Fox News called Arizona for Biden with just 73 percent of the state's vote counted.

Trump and his advisers erupted at the news. If it was true that Arizona was lost, it would call into doubt any claim of victory Trump might be able to make.

What ensued for Trump was a night of angry calls to Republican governors and advice from campaign aides that he ignored, leading to a middle-of-the-night presidential briefing in which he made a reckless and unsubstantiated string of remarks about the democratic process.

Standing in the East Room at 2.30am, he dismissed the election as a fraud and claimed he wanted to stop the counting of votes and leave the results to the Supreme Court.

The Trump campaign knew Arizona could be up for grabs, but the Fox News call putting it in Biden's column was symbolic, making it the first state that appeared to have flipped from the president's 2016 batch of winning states.

Arizona governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, had been on the phone all night with administration officials and campaign staff members, adamant that there were still Republican votes to be counted in his state.

Jason Miller, Trump's political adviser, disputed the accuracy of the call on Twitter and frantically called Fox News, asking the network to retract it. He was unsuccessful. Instead of retracting it, Fox News doubled down on its call.

Several hours later, Associated Press also called Arizona for Biden. Other news organizations had not declared a victor because of absentee ballots that remained to be counted.