A former Fox News political editor says some of the network’s own hosts are at least partly to blame for the “panic” and outrage over the decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The projection, which was made by Fox before all other networks, sparked the ire of Trumpworld at the time and led to some of the network’s own biggest stars claiming it was a bad call. Chris Stirewalt, who was fired from the network in January 2021, said in an interview with NPR published Tuesday that the anger over the call was misdirected. “We’re just telling you what’s going to happen. We’re not making anything happen,” he said of the analysts behind the call, whom he described as “just some nerds in a room.” The fallout, he said, “showed to me how much television—the perceptions of events, of television as entertainment, news as entertainment and treating it like a sport—had really damaged the capacity of Americans to be good citizens in a republic because they confused the TV show with the real thing.” The “murderous kind of rage” on display over the network’s Arizona call was also at least partly the result of Fox News personalities “repeating the baseless claim that Trump was going to win the election” for “months and months and months” ahead of the vote, he said.
