A former Fox News editor who was fired after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election has slammed his former employer over its election coverage, The New York Times reports.
Chris Stirewalt writes in an upcoming memoir that the network failed to properly inform Trump could lose the election and instead stoked “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred.” In his book Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machines Divides America and How to Fight Back, Stirewalt reiterated the claim that he was fired because he defended his decision to call Joe Biden the winner of Arizona’s 2020 electoral college votes on the same night that polls closed — a decision that enraged Trump and prompted to pressure the network to reverse the call.
Stirewalt claims the network’s bias in favor of Trump was entirely for ratings and had nothing to do with ideology.
“Even in the four years since the previous presidential election, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectation,” Stirewalt’s memoir says, adding that the decision to announce that Trump lost Arizona “came as a terrible shock” to the audience’s system — much like “serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice-cream sundaes for years.”
In regards to controversial Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Stirewalt says he’s “rich and famous, yet he regularly rails about the ‘big, legacy media outlets’. Somehow, nobody even giggles.”
“It does not take any kind of journalistic courage to pump out night after night exactly what your audience wants to hear.”
