Ex-Fox News Staffer Chris Stirewalt Makes Most Shocking Claim Yet About Old Employer In Book
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Chris Stirewalt, the former Fox News staffer who says he was fired after correctly projecting that Joe Biden would win Arizona in the 2020 election, offered his most provocative take yet on his ex-employer.
In his forthcoming book, obtained by The New York Times, Stirewalt says the network’s motive for pushing a far-right agenda isn’t to help the conservative cause and elect Republicans. It’s about profit.
Hosts such as Sean Hannity purposely overhyped the chances of some trailing GOP candidates to “juice the network’s ratings,” he wrote.
“They wanted it to be true because they wanted Republicans to win,” he wrote, “but keeping viewers keyed up about the epochal victory close at hand was an appealing incentive to exaggerate the G.O.P. chances. It was good for them to raise expectations, but it wasn’t good for the party they were rooting for.”
“Despite all that Fox’s detractors said about the network being a mouthpiece for the Republican Party, the two organizations had fundamentally different aims,” he continued, per the Times.
Stirewalt’s “Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America And How To Fight Back” is due out on Tuesday. But the veteran journalist has been blasting Fox News since he was laid off in January 2021. Fox called it a restructuring. Stirewalt claimed it was payback for when his Decision Desk team called Arizona for Biden, enraging Donald Trump and viewers.
“Chris Stirewalt’s quest for relevance knows no bounds,” a Fox News spokesperson told Mediaite on Sunday, adding that a colleague of Stirewalt’s from the Decision Desk is returning for this November’s elections.
Stirewalt said in his book that the conservative-baiting network stoked “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred.”
In fact, he added, Fox News set the table for Trump’s election-fraud lies well before the 2020 election.
“Had viewers been given a more accurate understanding of the race over time, Trump’s loss would have been seen as a likely outcome,” he wrote. “Instead of understanding his narrow win in 2016 as the shocking upset that it was, viewers were told to assume that polls don’t apply (unless they were good for Trump) and that forecasters like me were going to be wrong again.”
Stirewalt has previously ripped the network for amplifying Trump’s election lies and airing reckless content like Tucker Carlson’s documentary suggesting the 2021 Capitol riot was a false flag operation. Stirewalt testified before the House Jan. 6 committee earlier this summer.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
