MIKE EMANUEL: I joined an unknown startup called Fox News; it gave me a front-row seat to history
I was hired at Fox News in the first year of its existence — 1997 — before the vast majority of America knew what it was. In fact, I was hired without a job interview. The network’s top executives at the time offered me a job as a correspondent based on my audition reel.
It was an odd feeling to go to work for people I had never met at a network I had never seen. My career manager told me there were smart people at Fox who would likely figure out how to make it a success. So, I jumped at the chance to join the startup network.
At that point, we were not available on cable TV in much of America. So, when I would call people about doing an interview for a story, they would ask if I was at the local Fox affiliate. Then they would ask where they could see Fox News. I told them we were working on it. But if they agreed to do a story with me, I would send them a VHS tape after it aired.
About a month after I started, I was sent to London to work alongside the Fox team covering the death of Princess Diana. I thought that was going to be the story of my career. To be clear, it was a global story, but it was just the start of a truly extraordinary journey covering major national and international news of our time.
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Evidently, my Princess Diana coverage was decent. When I returned to our bureau in Los Angeles, my boss essentially interviewed me about where I had worked before local news in Los Angeles.
I told him I was at the Fox station in Austin, Texas, covering politics. His ears perked up, and he asked me if I knew then-Gov. George W. Bush. I told him the governor had nicknamed me "Mikey" since I covered his first campaign for governor in 1994 and his first couple of years in office. So, he asked if I could get a sit-down interview with Mr. Bush and instructed me to make it happen.
After the governor did a couple of interviews with me in 1997, my bosses asked me to move to Dallas to open a bureau there to cover that whole region of the country. But the message was that if there was a Texas political story, they wanted me there to cover it.
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I covered everything in that region and beyond from 1998 to just after President Bush’s 2001 inauguration. At one point, we were asked to come up with a story on a weekend because we needed more content for weekend shows.
My team pitched going to the world’s largest rattlesnake roundup in Sweetwater, Texas. I think I nearly gave the folks in the control room in New York a stroke when I jumped into the pit with the rattlesnakes. I was wearing heavy boots and protective chaps, but the producers were scared to death I was going to end up in the hospital with snake bites.
On election night 2000, I was on the platform in Austin, Texas, waiting to find out if George W. Bush had won or lost the election. We heard Vice President Gore had called to concede and then called back to say it was too close. Then, for six weeks, I camped out in Austin trying to figure out if Bush would be the 43rd president.
Once that historic election was sorted out, my bosses asked me to move to Washington.
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When I arrived in D.C., I had no Washington experience, so my bosses used me to do all kinds of stories. When President Bush would return to his Crawford, Texas, ranch, they would send me since the president would typically call on me to ask a question if he saw me in the crowd of reporters.
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Six months after moving to Washington came Sept. 11, 2001. While the understandable focus of our coverage was on New York City, there was chaos in Washington, with concerns the White House and the U.S. Capitol could also be targets.
My bosses sent me to the roof of our Washington bureau to do live updates on the situation here. From my position, we could see smoke behind me from the Pentagon.
Later that day, I was doing reports at the Pentagon. A month later, I was sent to Islamabad, Pakistan, to cover the buildup to the war in Afghanistan.
In early 2002, I was asked to go to Kabul to cover the war. Several of us went from being domestic correspondents to war correspondents virtually overnight.
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Then, in 2005, I was asked to embed with 10th Mountain Division soldiers who were tasked with securing western Baghdad so the Iraqis would be safe going to vote in an election. It was an amazing experience being with those brave men and women responsible for such a strategic location in the Iraqi capital.
I had the opportunity to be a White House correspondent in the final years of President Bush’s term and the first years of President Obama’s presidency.
Traveling across the country and around the globe with two American presidents was beyond my dreams when I started out in local news in Midland-Odessa, Texas, years ago.
Asking questions of both presidents in the Oval Office and at presidential news conferences was also the honor of a lifetime.
I had the opportunity to interview President Bush about being a wartime commander in chief and did the final TV interview with then-Vice President Dick Cheney.
In 2011, Fox executives asked me to move to Capitol Hill to be the chief congressional correspondent, a beat I had never covered before in my career.
There I covered a decade’s worth of State of the Union addresses, Supreme Court confirmations, Cabinet confirmations and my share of government shutdowns.
While I covered Capitol Hill, network leadership started asking me to fill in as an anchor. I had confidence about doing it, since, for 20 years, I had covered politics, war, natural disasters and more as a correspondent at the network. I felt like whatever news broke, I had probably covered it as a field correspondent before.
I was grateful for the opportunity to fill in as an anchor on the network’s top news programs and became a regular anchor on weekends.
While weekends are not typically as newsy as weekdays, massive stories break at any time.
I was anchoring on Sunday, July 21, 2024, when then-President Joe Biden announced he was withdrawing from his re-election campaign. We were live and had the story first. We threw out the show rundown and went wall-to-wall for 90 minutes with the breaking news, totally unscripted.
My producer, Eric Strain, would get in my ear to direct traffic. We would go from Kevin Corke reporting from the president’s weekend location in Delaware to Bret Baier on the phone to Brit Hume on the phone, back to Kevin, then to Martha MacCallum and Shannon Bream on the phone as the bosses rallied the weekday lineup to get into the office. At one point, Brit noted that this was history and congratulated me for being in the anchor chair to lead our coverage.
I was also anchoring the weekend of June 21, 2025, when President Trump ordered Operation Midnight Hammer. That was a series of precision strikes on three major Iranian nuclear facilities. It was an opportunity for my experience reporting on Afghanistan and Iraq to help guide my questions from the anchor chair.
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And I was anchoring the weekend of Jan. 3, 2026, when President Trump ordered Operation Absolute Resolve, a raid in Venezuela to capture Nicolás Maduro. We canceled our scheduled guests and went all in on the breaking news.
It feels like there have been thousands of adrenaline-rush stories in my nearly 30 years at Fox News. My dream as a young journalist was to make it back to New York, so my parents, family and friends could watch me on the local news. I’ve lived far beyond those dreams.
My loved ones have watched me cover major stories across the country and around the globe, and I will be eternally grateful for the opportunities my bosses have given me at Fox.
Getting to write the first draft of history since 1997 has been a tremendous blessing and a great honor.
Needless to say, I’m so thankful I took that leap of faith to join this startup network all those years ago.