Former Fox News columnist Chris Stirewalt said he was surprised by the internal storm that erupted in his former workplace after Fox became the first major news network to call Arizona for President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Stirewalt, who was fired by Fox in January 2021, testified before the Capitol Committee on Monday to investigate the Capitol Uprising on Monday, telling lawmakers that the chances of former President Donald Trump winning were almost nil as most called elections for Biden on November 7. 2020. Trump reportedly got angry that Fox’s decision-maker called the state of Arizona for Biden before most other stores did the same, but Stirwalt said he was confident of his team’s work. Biden eventually won the state with about 11,000 votes. “We were able to call early,” Stirewalt told the committee this week. “We managed to beat the competition.” But what Stirewalt did not expect was the wave of reactions at Fox that followed the exact screening. Stirewalt spoke to NPR’s David Folkenflik after his testimony Monday, telling the newspaper that people close to Trump were pounding Fox executives and presenters to get their Arizona call back. “We are not awarding ballots. We are not counting any ballots. We are nerds in a room, and that is it,” Stirewalt told NPR. “We tell you what is going to happen, we are not doing anything to make it happen.” The ordeal left Stirewalt disappointed with the state of the network news in the United States, he told the agency. “It showed me how … perceptions of television events as entertainment, news as entertainment, and their treatment as a sport had really damaged Americans’ ability to be good citizens in a democracy because they confused television as a real thing.” he said. Stirewalt said Fox News played a self-fulfilling prophecy in the anger of viewers who supported Trump over the Arizona decision, mourning the network’s opinion makers who, for months, repeated baseless allegations about Trump’s chances and the sanctity of the election. . “Fox News should be proud of the work we have done. We should have been rewarded and promoted and we should have defended the journalists we hired to do a job,” Stirewalt told NPR. Fox fired Stirewalt two months after the Arizona show. The network did not comment publicly on his dismissal. Stirewalt has spoken in the past about the “murderous rage” and the attacks he faced from conservative Fox viewers after the call. He told NPR on Monday that he hoped the 2020 impression would be final. “In 2024, we’re going to look back at 2020 and say, ‘Was that weird, going on?’ Or are we entering a new chapter in American history where we are gradually collapsing because we can not even agree on the outcome of the election?” .
