Stirewalt said the “rebellion on the populist right against the results of the 2020 elections” was partly a result of “media hype” that helped him try to “steal an election or at least get rich trying”.
Fox News, which did not respond to a request for comment on Stirewalt’s article, employs several propagandists in the role of hosts or contributors who made erroneous allegations of electoral fraud after the 2020 election.
Famous hosts with big platforms and massive audiences, like Sean Hannity, for weeks pushed the belief that the election had been stolen from Trump.
Stirewalt wrote that the refusal to believe the election results among many Trump supporters was a “tragic consequence of the informational malnutrition that afflicts the nation so much.”
“When I defended Biden’s call in the Arizona elections, I became the target of a murderous fury of consumers furious that their opinions were not confirmed,” added Stirewalt. “Having been pampered by self-validation coverage for so long, many Americans now consider any news that might suggest that they are wrong or that their side was defeated as an attack on them personally.”
In his article, Stirewalt described the United States “as a nation of overfed and malnourished news consumers”.
“Americans gorge themselves on empty informational calories daily, indulging their sugar doses of self-affirming half-truths and even blatant lies,” he wrote.
The call from the Fox News Arizona decision table came early on election night, sparking controversy and angering Trump and his team, who tried to reverse the situation.
But the network maintained it and Stirewalt aggressively defended it on the air during election week. The call, which was questioned by some data yearnings for being made so early, turned out to be correct. However, earlier this month, Stirewalt was released from the network that called home for more than a decade.