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."

It was also a violation of company policy. The data Ellis was reportedly swapping with the Bush camp (post-New Yorker, he now denies it) came from Voter News Service, a media-backed consortium that gathers crucial, hush-hush voting information on Election Day. According to a Boston Globe news report during the primary season, "Fox News chairman Roger Ailes warned staffers to keep exit poll results to themselves and reiterated Fox's policy not to 'broadcast, publish or disseminate outcome projections' based on exit poll data before poll closings."

Ailes, of course, is the former Republican political image-maker who in his earlier incarnation coached George W. Bush's father.

On Monday, when the New Yorker hit newsstands, Fox News vice president John Moody admitted that Ellis had erred, but defended hiring him, suggesting it would have been unfair not to hire him simply because of who he was related to -- a remarkably genial interpretation of conflict of interest. By Tuesday, after the revelations of Ellis' information-trading, Moody came down harder, saying that Fox was pondering disciplinary action against Ellis for misusing his position of power at the channel.

Since Ellis was working for Fox as a consultant on a 30-day contract, that point seems moot.

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