Stirewalt said the “rebellion of the populist right against the results of the 2020 election” was the result of some of Trump’s “hype men in the media” helping him “steal an election or at least get rich”. .
Fox News, which did not respond to a request for comment on Stirewalt’s piece, employs several propagandists in the role of hosts or on-air contributors who put forward false allegations of electoral fraud in the wake of the 2020 election .
Star hosts with major platforms and massive viewers, like Sean Hannity, insisted for weeks on the belief that Trump’s election had been stolen.
Stirewalt wrote that the refusal to believe the election results among many Trump supporters was a “tragic consequence of the informational malnutrition that plagues the country so badly.”
“When I defended Biden’s call in the Arizona election, I became the target of murderous anger from consumers who were outraged that their views were not confirmed,” Stirewalt added. “After so long under the spell of self-affirming reporting, many Americans now consider any news that could suggest they are wrong or that their party has been defeated as an attack on them personally.”
In his piece, Stirewalt described the US “as a nation of news consumers who are both overfed and undernourished.”
“Americans fill themselves with empty informational calories every day, spoiling their sugar flakes with self-affirming half-truths and even outright lies,” he wrote.
The Fox News decision desk’s call to Arizona came early on election night, sparking controversy and infuriated Trump and his team who tried to undo it.
But the network was behind it, and Stirewalt aggressively defended it on the network’s broadcast during election week. The call, questioned by some data wonks for being made so early, turned out to be correct. Earlier this month, however, Stirewalt was let go from the network he’d been calling home for over a decade.