One of the most glaring peculiarities about the Fox News Channel's campaign coverage in the run-up to the November 4 election was the channel's frequent insistence, in the waning days of the campaign, that the election was remarkably close, with Republican John McCain surging.

In reality, few polls suggested this was happening (see PollingReport.com; Pollster.com), but Fox chose to give a handful of outlying, unrepresentative surveys considerable attention. It was as if the channel were less interested in accurately reporting the state of the campaign than in presenting an alternate reality that would be pleasing to partisan viewers.

Here's a sampling of that coverage, day by day:

October 27:

FOX NEWS ANALYST DICK MORRIS: I think that we have to understand that redistribution of income is liberal euphemism for socialism. And you know.

FOX NEWS HOST SEAN HANNITY: Well, I -- and I agree. But let me move the ball a little bit here…. This is, obviously, a very sensitive issue for the Obama campaign. They feel like they've been exposed. It started with Joe the Plumber.

MORRIS: And they're hemorrhaging votes.... Zogby, Rasmussen, and Gallup, all have this race five points apart…. Zogby down from 12, Rasmussen down from eight, and Gallup down from six. And Investors Business Daily has it to 2.8, and Zogby had a one-night finding of three. The averages that over three nights.

October 28:

"Let me put up on the screen the latest polls, because we've had a tightening in many of them. Likely voters, Gallup, it's a two-point race. Zogby, now four-point. AP, it's dead even. IDP, another close race. Obviously spread the wealth, socialism, Obama's welfare plan is not going over well with the American people."
--Sean Hannity


FOX NEWS ANALYST NEWT GINGRICH: "I got a report earlier this evening that in the very, very close states that, in fact, McCain has closed the gap substantially, and that internal polling now shows him within pretty good striking distance in every single close state.

HANNITY: Well, we're going to go over some of these polls. The likely voter poll, Gallup, now has a two-point race.


October 29:

FOX NEWS ANCHOR MARTHA MacCALLUM: McCain is blasting Obama, saying his rival doesn't have what it takes to protect America from terrorists. And that kind of tough talk may be helping him a bit. Here's a look at new Rasmussen Poll showing McCain gaining ground with Obama at 50 to McCain's 47. That's the first time in this particular poll that McCain has been within three points of Barack Obama in more than a month. Fox's Carl Cameron is with the McCain camp live in Riviera Beach, Florida tonight....

FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT CARL CAMERON: Well, for the last several weeks, Senator McCain has been focusing on economic issues. And if anything sort of to be credited with his apparent surge and the tightening in the national polls, it would be presumably be his emphasis on Barack Obama's economic policies, which McCain has sort of tattooed as tax-and-spend liberalism.