Former Fox News Political Editor Chris Stirewalt Blasts Network for Inciting ‘Black-Helicopter-Level Paranoia and Hatred’ in New Book
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Former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt has not been shy about criticizing his erstwhile employer, and he is maintaining that habit in his new book, Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back, accusing the network of stoking dangerous levels of paranoia and hatred in their viewers.
Stirewalt worked with Fox News’ Decision Desk, part of the team that led the network to be the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden, drawing outrage from former President Donald Trump and his supporters. In the aftermath, Stirewalt disappeared from Fox News’ airwaves and was fired in Jan. 2021.
The network, it should be noted, released a statement saying Stirewalt was laid off as part of a realignment of Fox News’ “business and reporting structure to meet the demands of this new era.” A Fox News spokesperson told Mediaite “Chris Stirewalt’s endless attempts at regaining relevance know no bounds.”
Stirewalt has rejected that explanation in multiple interviews, continued to blast Fox News for their election coverage, including in his testimony earlier this summer for the Jan. 6 House Select Committee, and his critique of the network is a core part of his book, which will be released next week.
The New York Times’ Jeremy W. Peters got an advance copy of Stirewalt’s book and wrote about its “often candid reflection on the state of political journalism” in the latest edition of the paper’s On Politics newsletter.
“I got canned after very vocal and very online viewers — including the then-president of the United States — became furious when our Decision Desk was the first to project that Joe Biden would win the former G.O.P. stronghold of Arizona in 2020,” Stirewalt wrote, insisting it was political reasons that shoved him out the door, not the “restructuring” the network had claimed.
Over Stirewalt’s 11 years at Fox News, “he witnessed Fox feeding its viewers more and more of what they wanted to hear, and little else,” wrote Peters, an “affirming coverage” that “got worse” during the Trump presidency.
“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 expectations,” Stirewalt wrote in another excerpt Peters highlighted. “Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”
Fox News, Stirewalt wrote, is guilty of inciting “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred” and has led the way in radicalizing the conservative movement.
Tucker Carlson is highlighted as an especially egregious hypocrite in the book, a “rich and famous” man who “regularly rails about the ‘big, legacy media outlets'” while he is the top-rated host at a massive corporate media outlet himself.
“It does not take any kind of journalistic courage to pump out night after night exactly what your audience wants to hear,” Stirewalt wrote about Carlson.
