Ousted Fox News Politics Editor on Dominion Lawsuit Revelations: ‘It Feels Really Good To Be Vindicated’

When former Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt was making the promotional rounds last August for his book Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back, the Fox public relations department was not shy about batting down the number-cruncher’s claims of being fired for his early election-night call of Joe Biden winning Arizona and therefore likely the presidency.

“Chris Stirewalt’s quest for relevance knows no bounds,” an unnamed Fox News spokesperson sneered back then to The New York Times.

The cable news leader likely has a little less swagger after the past two weeks of fallout from a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, which for weeks after the election was accused by network personalities and guests of engineering a fantastical conspiracy to depose Donald Trump from the White House. Pre-trial filings based on internal messages and depositions reveal anchors and executives seeking to mollify their audience’s angry Trump supporters by scapegoating employees—including Stirewalt’s boss, Washington bureau chief Bill Sammon—for indelicately delivering news the president didn’t want to hear.

“Maybe best to let Bill go right away,” News Corp Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch told Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott in a November 20, 2020, communication detailed in a Dominion filing this week. Such a move would “be a big message with Trump people,” Murdoch added. Sammon was informed he was on the outs that very day, according to Dominion; his retirement and Stirewalt’s layoff were announced two months later.

“I will say this—and I’ll speak for Bill Sammon…and for the other guys and gals on the Decision Desk: It feels really good to be vindicated in this way,” Stirewalt told me and Michael Moynihan Tuesday night, for an episode of The Fifth Column podcast. “We knew that we were isolated inside the company at that time, but we did not know how isolated we were, and we didn’t know the pressure that was being applied internally against us…. I think what those filings reveal, and what I read about at Fox, are people making short-term decisions to try to maintain artificial sugar-high levels of viewership from an election season after the election was over, and not being willing to suffer the consequences of being a news organization.”

That the internal post-election pressure included the famously Trump-averse Murdoch—who, on the day before he suggested sacrificing Sammon denounced the conspiracy-mongering of lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell as “really crazy stuff“—illustrates the self-constructed, still-lucrative predicament that Fox News, the Republican Party, and American conservatism all find themselves in at the beginning of the 2024 presidential cycle. Still enjoying the rarified views at the top of the totem pole, but clinging on for dear life, terrified of alienating the people down below who made them rich.

“You can’t give the crazies an inch right now,” Scott warned in an email after two on-air employees expressed publicly the same kind of skepticism toward the Giuliani/Powell theory that Murdoch had communicated privately. “They are looking for and blowing up all appearances of disrespect to the audience.”

What kind of business depends on consciously (if condescendingly) catering to “crazies”? For the longest time, that would be “Conservatism Inc.,” the disparaging moniker given by some grassroots conservatives to describe (in the uncharitable words of Conservapedia) the “loose coalition of self-interested RINOs/neoconservatives, token conservatives, Establishment Republicans, consultants, organizations, PACs, etc., who try to claim leadership of the conservative movement while enriching or otherwise benefiting themselves.” The kind of people who “market themselves as authentically conservative to the public (usually during election years), yet hold widely liberal positions, and hinder true conservatism.”

On the politician level, the caricatured avatar of Conservatism Inc. travels to “crazy base land” during contested primaries, shifts to the center for general elections, then pivots to the Beltway status quo once in office. The enabling consultancy-class wing is there to get the base riled up with red meat, while assuring friends on the Acela that they don’t really care about that culture war stuff.

Fox News, like its poorer cousins on social media and the AM dial, has to constantly maintain credibility both with the populist grassroots and the elitists they elect—a delicate dance between opinion and journalism at the best of institutional times, a combustible combination