Two senior leaders of Fox News’s reporting division are exiting the network as the cable channel replaces some news programming with right-wing opinion shows and tries to lure back viewers who balked at its coverage of the 2020 election and its aftermath, reports The NYTimes.
On Tuesday morning, Fox News fired Chris Stirewalt, the veteran politics editor who was an onscreen face of the network’s election night projection that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had defeated President Trump in Arizona, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
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| Chris Stirewalt |
On Monday, Bill Sammon, Fox News’s longtime Washington bureau chief, told staff members that he would retire at the end of January. Three people with knowledge of internal discussions said that Mr. Sammon, who had editorial oversight of the network’s Decision Desk, had faced criticism from network executives over his handling of election coverage, despite the Arizona call ultimately being accurate.
Executives at Fox News — the profit center of Rupert Murdoch’s American media empire — have been concerned by a post election drop in ratings, a slump that has persisted for two months as upstart rivals like Newsmax gained viewers by featuring fringier fare that embraced Mr. Trump’s baseless theories about electoral fraud.
The Washington Post reports Rupert Murdoch, Fox News’s co-founder, has told colleagues that the way Fox handled the Arizona call caused reputational damage and cemented the view among some Trump supporters that the network is aligned against him. Even though Fox’s projection ended up being accurate, Murdoch has fretted that it was handled poorly.
Fox recently shook up its evening lineup, replacing former 7 p.m. news anchor Martha MacCallum with a rotating cast of opinion hosts. The move came as Fox’s ratings in that time slot had been outstripped by rivals.
While the decision desk is run by a contractor, Arnon Mishkin, who handled the statistical modeling of the desk, it fell to Sammon to determine editorially when Fox was ready to make its projection on air.
It was Sammon’s role that raised eyebrows in the aftermath of the call, Fox staffers told The Post. But it was Stirewalt’s dismissal that caused more consternation in the building, they said. “A major overreaction to Trump and the audience freakout,” said one staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Murdoch, whose family controls Fox’s parent company, has been taking a more active interest in its programming in the wake of the election. He was involved in the decision to move MacCallum and is said to be advocating for larger changes as the network navigates the Biden era.
Fox’s corporate leadership has been scrutinizing the news division, which is led by Jay Wallace, the president and executive editor of Fox News Media, according to a person with knowledge of internal discussions. Fox News’s daytime news programs, which often feature conservative guests but are helmed by anchors who do not report to the network’s opinion side, have experienced a sharp loss in viewership.
Fox News also laid off nearly 20 staffers across Fox News Digital on Tuesday as part of restructuring efforts first announced last year.
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