A former Fox News politics editor who was forced out of the conservative TV network shortly after the anchors’ favorite candidate, Donald Trump, lost the 2020 presidential race, has said the channel failed the its viewers with its electoral coverage.
In his forthcoming memoir, Chris Stirewalt says Fox News abdicated its duty to prepare Trump supporters for the possibility that he would lose, instead fueling the “black helicopter-level paranoia and hatred” that it feeds white supremacist groups but that translates into huge audiences.
Stirewalt’s breaking news: Why media rage machines are dividing America and how to fight back also reiterates the belief of many that Fox fired him because he always defended, even on air, his team’s decision to declare Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 Arizona general election. university votes the same night the polls closed.
The call infuriated Trump, prompting the sitting president and his allies to mount a lobbying campaign aimed at getting Fox to retract the decision while that camp lied that election fraudsters in other states in the camp of battle were stealing the election for Biden.
The New York Times obtained and reported on one advance copy of the book.
Fox officials have previously said that Stirewalt’s departure from the network in early 2021 was simply a layoff amid a broader company restructuring, noting that the employee who was actually in charge of the desk that made Arizona’s call during that fateful hour remains with the company.
A statement from the network on Monday also dismissed his former editor’s other recollections of his time at Fox News, saying, “Chris Stirewalt’s endless attempts to regain relevance know no bounds.”
However, in his memoir, Stirewalt maintains that Fox News’ alliance with Trump and other Republican political candidates has nothing to do with ideology. Instead, it’s all about getting ratings and fattening profits, not caring that its top-rated host, Tucker Carlson, endorses conspiracy theories that radicalize violent white supremacists and far right, including those who led the deadly attack on the Capitol on January 6.
“Even in the four years since the previous presidential election, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to listen to news that challenged their expectations,” Stirewalt’s memoir adds.
This was even the case when viewers’ expectations were “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred,” according to the memoir.
Stirewalt says his team’s decision to accurately project on election night that Trump had lost Arizona to Biden to an audience that had been thirsty for the Republican incumbent to pull off a victory over his Democratic challenger “was a terrible shock to his system.” The memoir compares this call to “serving green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream for years.”
Stirewalt also expresses disbelief that Carlson’s viewers are portraying him as brave by discussing topics that are taboo to the mainstream when, according to the ousted editor, he is simply regurgitating the things his audience already believes.
“Carlson is rich and famous, but he often talks about the ‘big legacy media,'” the memoir argues. “Somehow, no one’s laughing.
“It takes no journalistic courage to deliver night after night exactly what your audience wants to hear.”
Among the conspiracy theories Carlson has championed is the racist notion that white Americans, faced with declining birthrates, are being deliberately replaced by immigration. He suddenly went quiet on that idea after a white man who shot and killed 10 black people in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, cited it as his motivation.
Stirewalt’s departure from Fox News, where he spent about 11 years, came less than two weeks after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a desperate attempt to prevent Congress from certifying his defeat to Biden. A bipartisan Senate report linked at least seven deaths to that attack.
Since then, Stirewalt has been vocally critical of Fox News and testified before the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack, telling the panel that he knew the Arizona call would be consequential because it implied a true state of battleground on which Trump’s chances of victory depended.
