Review: Chris Stirewalt’s Book Chides Fox News For ‘Black-Helicopter Level Paranoia’ — But He Targets Plenty Of Other News Outlets For Stoking Rage For Ratings

deadline.com:

Less than two weeks after the siege of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Fox News dismissed its political editor, Chris Stirewalt, in what the network said was a restructuring, and he said was a firing.As many media reporters and commentators noted, Stirewalt had defended the network’s correct call of Arizona for Joe Biden on Election Night, the first sign that Donald Trump would lose the race.

What resulted was a backlash from Trump and his supporters, not just “insane rage” directed at the network, but against Stirewalt himself.

One Republican senator, Kevin Cramer, accused him of a “cover-up,” as if Stirewalt himself had been counting votes.His new book, Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back, delves into his dismissal, but this is hardly a tell-all, or singularly focused expose of what’s happened to his former employer.Rather, it makes the case that the news business, in its desire for viewer and reader engagement, has tilted too heavily toward giving the audience what it wants to hear, rather than what they need to know.

He argues that, in the quest for attention in an ever-fractured environment, news outlets have prioritized stoking emotion —grievance, anxiety or anger — over their civic-minded duty of informing their audience.“Every day, editors and producers go hunting for any story that will either flatter their outlet’s target audience or, more likely, show the fundamental inferiority or evil of the other side,” Stirewalt writes. “They don’t do this because they are bad people themselves or even necessarily aligned with the slant of the story.