Chris Stirewalt’s new book, Broken News explains how the media drove politicians to ramp up the partisan temperature.
Chris Stirewalt's new book, Broken News explains how the media drove politicians to ramp up the partisan temperature.
P resident Joe Biden ran on a pledge to unite the country, vowing to dedicate his “whole soul” to that worthy mission in his inaugural address. Nearly two years later, he’s publicly labeled roughly one third of the country “semi-fascists” — not full fascist, mind you — after all, Biden also promised to compromise.
Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist has painted his opponent Ron DeSantis as the exemplar of cultural-war divisiveness, but it was Crist who told the millions of Floridians who support DeSantis that he doesn’t want their votes because they have “hate in [their] hearts.”
We’ve fallen a long way since Barack Obama declared in 2004 that, “We are one people, all of us declaring allegiance to the United States of America.”
In his new book, Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back, former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt explains how a faltering media goaded politicians into making enemies of their countrymen.
Stirewalt has seen it all: He started in journalism in the heyday of the early 1990s at a regional newspaper in his native West Virginia. Founded in 1873, the Charleston Daily Mail was still humming along on fat advertising margins with the rest of the industry when he walked in the door more than a century later.
He went from there to a local TV station and then on to the upstart Washington Examiner, where he wrote a column and began to appear frequently on Fox News as a commentator. So he’s had a front row seat to the decline of American journalism, or as he puts it “the bloodletting” that reached its nadir in the early aughts. And he’s been there ever since, watching — and, as he readily admits, occasionally participating — as a decimated business tries desperately to claw back profitability by stirring partisan outrage.
The media’s attention to the Trump-related passages of the book confirm Stirewalt’s diagnosis of the perverse incentives that lead to personality-driven political coverage — but, as he explains with historical anecdotes reaching back to the Founding, the problems didn’t start with Trump.
The U.S. has a rich history of yellow journalism that encourages partisan warfare, but in Stirewalt’s telling, the Internet and 24-hour-cable commentary unleashed something fundamental in the American character that had previously been restrained. The News Nation political editor expanded on that thesis in a recent interview with National Review.
A fundamental shift took place after 9/11, when the more conspiratorial online outlets began pushing the “Iraq is all about oil” hypothesis to explain George W. Bush’s decision to invade.
“The message was ‘he’s a traitor.’ And that was also behind the ‘9/11 was an inside job’ theory that started to slurp around the internet around that time. We crossed over at that point to ‘he’s not just wrong or misguided, but he’s wicked, and he’s trying to harm the United States,’” Stirewalt said.
“Then we replaced George Bush with Barack Obama and I heard, ‘he’s a secret Kenyan Muslim, who had come to destroy the US. He’s here as a fifth column Manchurian candidate to destroy America,’” he continued. “Then Trump shows up, and it was not enough for Democrats to say he was wrong or dumb or corrupt, but they said that he was a puppet of the Kremlin who was trying to destroy the United States.”
And since Trump is a symptom rather than the cause of our collective outrage addiction, the problem won’t abate when — or perhaps, if — he ever exits the stage.
“There is a reservoir of ill-will on both sides against the avatar of the other party. So if Republicans nominate Ben Sasse, Mr. squeaky clean, corn husker, ‘aw shucks’ Christian gentleman, they’ll just come up with a new set of things that are wrong with him and wrong with those who support him.” Stirewalt said.
“Similarly, if Democrats nominate Joe Manchin, who the Republicans had this big crush on then all of a sudden it will change and they’ll say he’s corrupt, he’s evil,” he continued.
The media has paid outsized attention to the decision made by Stirewalt and his Fox News Decision Desk colleagues to call Arizona for Joe Biden ahead of their competitors, drawing the fury of then-president Donald Trump and leading a short time later to Stirewalt’s departure from Fox. But those chaotic hours were just the culmination of trends that had been building since Stirewalt joined Fox full-time ten years earlier.
Addressing the Fox brass during a walk-through meeting on midterm-election day in 2010, Stirewalt presented Roger Ailes with his team’s projections for the night. After a series of all-nighters crunching the numbers and trying to account for every possible scenario, they concluded Republicans would win 64 congressional seats.
“Dick Morris says it could be 100. Why is yours so low?” Ailes shot back when informed of the projection.
Stirewalt goes on to explain that Morris had become a “joke” in the years leading up to the midterms, mindlessly cheerleading for Republicans in exchange for frequent guest spots on Hannity, but he didn’t dare say that to Ailes.
Stirewalt’s number ended up being nearly dead on. (Republicans won 63 seats that night). But, in the meeting, he committed the mortal cable-news sin: he didn’t say exactly what his audience — namely, Ailes — wanted to hear. Just as he would do again on Election Night exactly ten years later, when he told his audience — namely Trump and his tens of millions of supporters — something they didn’t want to hear: It was over. There was nothing they could do.
Well, if that’s the case, might as well change the channel . . .
And ultimately, that’s what the executives at Fox and its cable rivals care about, Stirewalt argues: the profit lost when viewers pick up the remote.
“The story they were telling was good for ratings or the frequency of their appearances,” he writes. “They wanted it to be true because they wanted Republicans to win, but keeping viewers keyed up about the epochal victory close at hand was an appealing incentive to exaggerate the GOP chances. It was good for them to raise expectations, but it wasn’t good for the party they were rooting for.”
Fox is not, as much of the media claim, dedicated to the GOP’s success, just as MSNBC is not dedicated to the success of the Democrats. They’re dedicated to their bottom lines. Their programming decisions distort the parties’ understanding of the electorate and makes them less competitive. And they reward politicians for behaving the way Trump did when he ran in 2016, and the way Biden has since winning the presidency on a promise to bring down the temperature that Trump helped spike.
“The very online media, Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow, are relatively low viewership, but high salience because of the high-propensity voters and donors and activists who are driving discussions within the party,” Stirewalt said, arguing that the political obsessives who tune into those programs have disproportionate sway, especially in primaries.
“Persuadable voters in 2020 did not think Donald Trump was a good person. But some of them were still willing to vote for him because they were very concerned about what the Democrats would bring when they came in,” he continued. “And what Democrats kept talking about was Trump’s low character, here’s his tax returns, etc. That’s not persuading a voter. Just like Republicans with Hunter Biden. Nobody is voting on the Hunter Biden question.”
The only solution, Stirewalt argues, is for journalists and news consumers to rededicate themselves to eating their vegetables, rather than the partisan junk food shared among people who evolved in an era of information scarcity and are now overloaded with calories.
That would be nice, but can it work as a business? Despite all he’s seen, the veteran newsman is optimistic.
“We have agency as citizens, and we have special obligations as journalists. I believe that aspirationally fair journalism can be profitable,” he said. “I believe there is a market for it and I believe there is evidence of that.”