Fox News correspondent Mike Emanuel joined the network in 1997, its first year of existence, hired as a correspondent without ever sitting for a job interview. Network executives offered him the position based solely on his audition reel.
At the time, Fox News was not available on cable television in much of the country. Emanuel has recalled that when he called potential interview subjects, they often asked whether he worked for a local Fox affiliate, then asked where they could even watch the channel. If someone agreed to an interview anyway, Emanuel would mail them a VHS tape of the segment once it aired.
About a month into the job, Fox sent him to London to help cover the death of Princess Diana. He has said he assumed that story would define his career. It turned out to be the opening chapter of a much longer run covering major domestic and international events.
From Austin to Dallas to the White House
Before joining Fox, Emanuel had worked at the local Fox station in Austin, Texas, covering state politics, where then-Gov. George W. Bush had nicknamed him “Mikey” after Emanuel covered Bush’s first gubernatorial campaign in 1994. When Emanuel’s Fox News bosses learned of that connection following his Diana coverage, they asked him to secure a sit-down interview with Bush. After he landed interviews with the governor in 1997, the network moved him to Dallas to open a bureau covering Texas and the surrounding region.
He covered that beat from 1998 into early 2001. Among the assignments was a trip to the world’s largest rattlesnake roundup in Sweetwater, Texas, where Emanuel jumped into a pit of rattlesnakes wearing heavy boots and protective chaps, alarming producers watching from the control room in New York.
Emanuel was on the platform in Austin on election night 2000 when Vice President Al Gore called to concede the presidential race to Bush, then called back to retract the concession as the race tightened. Emanuel spent the following six weeks in Austin covering the disputed election before Fox reassigned him to Washington once the outcome was settled.
Covering 9/11 and two wars
Six months after Emanuel arrived in Washington, the September 11, 2001 attacks occurred. With concerns that the White House and U.S. Capitol could also be targeted, Fox sent him to the roof of its Washington bureau to deliver live updates, with smoke from the Pentagon visible behind him. He reported from the Pentagon itself later that day.
A month later, Fox sent Emanuel to Islamabad, Pakistan, to cover preparations for the war in Afghanistan, and in early 2002 to Kabul to cover the war directly. In 2005, he embedded with soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division tasked with securing western Baghdad ahead of an Iraqi election.
Emanuel later served as a White House correspondent during the final years of the Bush administration and the early years of the Obama administration, questioning both presidents in the Oval Office and at news conferences. He interviewed Bush about serving as a wartime commander-in-chief and conducted the final television interview with then-Vice President Dick Cheney.
Capitol Hill and the anchor chair
In 2011, Fox moved Emanuel to Capitol Hill as chief congressional correspondent, a beat new to him. Over the following decade he covered State of the Union addresses, Supreme Court confirmations, Cabinet confirmations and multiple government shutdowns. During that stretch, network leadership also began asking him to fill in as an anchor, a role he later took on regularly on weekends.
Emanuel was anchoring on Sunday, July 21, 2024, when then-President Joe Biden announced he was withdrawing from his re-election campaign. Fox had the story first and scrapped its planned programming for 90 minutes of unscripted, wall-to-wall coverage, with producer Eric Strain directing reports from correspondent Kevin Corke at Biden’s Delaware location and phone reports from Bret Baier, Brit Hume, Martha MacCallum and Shannon Bream as the network’s weekday anchors rushed into the office.
He was also in the anchor chair on the weekend of June 21, 2025, when President Trump ordered Operation Midnight Hammer, a series of precision strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities, and again on the weekend of January 3, 2026, when Trump ordered Operation Absolute Resolve, a raid in Venezuela to capture Nicolás Maduro. Fox canceled its scheduled guests both times to cover the breaking news live.
Emanuel, who began his career in local news in Midland-Odessa, Texas, has described nearly 30 years at Fox News as a chance to write the first draft of history since the network’s founding in 1997.
