Fox News’ political editor Chris Stirewalt was fired less than two months after the Capitol siege on January 6, 2021. The network claimed that the move was a restructuring. Stirewalt said it was a firing.
As many media reporters and commentators noted, Stirewalt had defended the network’s correct call of Arizona for Joe Biden on Election Night, the first sign that Donald Trump would lose the race. The result was not only a backlash by Trump and his supporters but also a retaliation from the media. “insane rage”It was directed against Stirewalt, not at the network. Kevin Cramer, a Republican senator, accused Stirewalt, however, of being a “cover-up,” as if Stirewalt himself had been counting votes.
His latest book, Broken News: Why America’s Media Rage Machine Is Divided and How We Can Fight Back, delves into his dismissal, but this is hardly a tell-all, or singularly focused expose of what’s happened to his former employer.
It argues that the news industry, in its quest for viewer and reader engagement has shifted too heavily towards giving the audience what they want to hear rather than what they actually need. He argues that, in the quest for attention in an ever-fractured environment, news outlets have prioritized stoking emotion —grievance, anxiety or anger — over their civic-minded duty of informing their audience.
“Every day, editors and producers go hunting for any story that will either flatter their outlet’s target audience or, more likely, show the fundamental inferiority or evil of the other side,” Stirewalt writes. “They don’t do this because they are bad people themselves or even necessarily aligned with the slant of the story. It’s just that this kind of contempt is profitable because it is easy to trigger. To get someone to look at a story in an impartial way takes a lot of work.”
Stirewalt shared an anecdote about an earlier time in his Fox News career. He attended an Election Day 2010 meeting of Fox News executives and Roger Ailes, then Fox News head, wanted to know how many seats the Republicans would win that evening. Stirewalt provided 64 answers.
“Dick Morris says it could be one hundred. Why is yours so low?” Ailes shot back.
Stirewalt writes that he didn’t come out and say that he thought Morris’ predictions were a joke, designed to get the pundit’s attention on his Sean Hannity guest shots. Stirewalt didn’t back off from the analysis either, which turned to be almost right. (The GOP won 63 of those seats in that year’s election).
“The story they were telling was good for ratings or the frequency of their appearances,” Stirewalt writes. “They wanted it to be true because they wanted Republicans to win, but keeping viewers keyed up about the epochal victory close at hand was an appealing incentive to exaggerate the GOP chances. them to raise expectations, but it wasn’t good for the party they were rooting for.”
There have been many books that have dealt with the same topics, some by academics and others by politicians looking to settle scores. “the media,” but Stirewalt pitches this book as a little different, from the view of an insider who’s seen quite a bit in his career.
Fox News does get some of his criticisms, but he also acknowledges that he is not the only one. “has not always been on the side of the angels.” He calls out the network’s decision to program the Tucker Carlson January 6th documentary on its subscription Fox Nation streaming service.
“Fox is inciting black-helicopter level paranoia and hatred to get viewers of its free cable news channel to sign up for a sixty-five-dollar ‘Patriot’ package on its subscription streaming service,”He writes.
Stirewalt rebuts the claim that Fox News may be a Republican party tool. Instead, he argues, it’s the other way around. Case in point, when Ted Cruz came on Tucker Carlson’s show earlier this year to apologize for referring to the siege on the Capitol as a “violent terrorist attack on the Capitol.”
“Even given Cruz’s superhuman capacity to endure humiliation in pursuit of power, it was hard to watch,” Stirewalt writes. “That doesn’t sound like ‘A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News’ that Roger Ailes pitched to Richard Nixon in 1970 and then brought to life twenty-five years later. It sounds more like a party that has been captured by an enterprise that does not share its same goals.”
A Fox News spokesperson said in response to Stirewalt’s book, “Chris Stirewalt’s endless attempts at regaining relevance know no bounds.”Arnon Mishikin, the Decision Desk lead for Arizona, is still employed by the network. According to the network, he will be returning for midterms.
Stirewalt doesn’t confine his critique to the right, but all across the media spectrum. The book begins with The Washington Post newsroom. “leaderboards that show which stories are clicking the best with readers in the digital world.”
His point is that, even though Kabul’s fall was a major international news story, “big mover”This was the headline of the story. “A conservative cardinal who criticized the vaccine caught covid. Days later, he was put on a ventilator.”
“Even on big news days, Post readers reliably plus-up stories that follow a couple of simple narratives: either wicked right-wingers getting their just desserts or the plights of innocents suffering because of right-wingers’ behavior,”He writes.
He wrote that The New York Times (1619 Project) and The New York Times were created with a stated purpose. “destroy the idea of the American Creed,”It was not much different than Fox News’ suggestion that the January 6th terrorist attack was a coincidence. “false flag” operation. The Times, he said, was “using a frontal assault on the idea of America’s founding as a new birth of freedom that it very plainly, if imperfectly, was in order to upsell super-users from subscriptions to thirty-five-dollar books.”This point is likely to be disputed by many Times editors as well as the Pulitzer Organization.
The book’s publisher is, ironically enough, Center Street, which specializes in conservative titles. However, even though Trump-supporting authors are included in its list, Stirewalt (now politics editor at NewsNation) is not an advocate of January 6th. He testified before The January 6th Committee as well as being a contributing editor to The Dispatch.
He does warn of one thing. “apocalypticism,”Writing about education, democracy, climate change and other issues can be overwhelming. Reporters should also abandon any attempt to be objective when Trump-incited notions of democracy under threat are a part of their writing.
“Americans need more common spaces in which they can have confidence not only that information will be accurate, but that points of view will be fairly represented,”He wrote. “We will always come up short in our inclusivity, impartiality, and capacity for holding bad actors to account, but if we throw away aspirational fairness in favor of activist, opinionated journalism we are not fighting entrenched power, but feeding it.”
While his arguments aren’t new in media commentary but they are usually from academics and politicos looking to settle some scores. Stirewalt’s is a bit different, in that he’s got an inside view, having worked his way up from local newspapers in West Virginia to the Washington Examiner to Fox News. He knows all the tricks of his trade.
He’s also got a passion for history, one of the strengths of the book. He also discusses other times of trouble in the news media’s history, starting with the founding fathers (when all news was partisan) and ending with the rise of radio where hosts routinely spew propaganda. As if not to get too apocalyptic, he notes that the country’s media ecosystem faced similar times of upheaval before and still survived.
Stirewalt is keen to shine a spotlight on what is broken but his primary focus is on politics and less on the areas in which the business excels. Even though cable news networks are obsessive about ratings, they produced compelling coverage on the war in Ukraine. They continue to send correspondents across the region despite all the safety risks.
People complain so often about “the media,”Instead of trying to cover it all with one brush, they focus only on one aspect of it, typically the 24-hour news networks. Although they may not be as popular as the cable news shows, the more serious network news broadcasts still get a wider audience than those on the cable news channels.
He also suggests a number of solutions, such curbing anonymous sources and treating political activity as a game. He points out that the news coverage volume increases. “the quality of that coverage seems to be constantly in decline.”
That may be so, but what’s unclear is whether there is a primetime cable audience to counter sensationalism, partisanship and celebrity fixation. Stirewalt’s employer NewsNation launched in 2020 by pitching itself as an unbiased news source, and the audiences have been a fraction of its well-established rivals. It’s since tried to move more to personalities, with Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield hosting shows, and, coming this fall, Chris Cuomo.