Chris Stirewalt Wants to Reinvent the Sunday Talk Show By Rejecting ‘Rage Revenue’

Chris Stirewalt has had a front row seat to the power and pitfalls of cable news, and he’s bringing that experience to his newly-launched show, The Hill Sunday with Chris Stirewalt, which airs on NewsNation and will debut on The CW on April 7. He spoke with Mediaite about how he hopes taking the harder path to media success will pay off in the end despite today’s divisively-siloed media environment.

Stirewalt was a core part of the Fox News Decision Desk team that made the early (and accurate) call in November 2020 that Joe Biden won Arizona, which ignited a furious reaction from then-President Donald Trump and the network’s own viewers. After a few months of exile from Fox News programs, Stirewalt’s employment was terminated. He moved on to join NewsNation as its political editor in 2022, as well as serving as a contributing editor at The Dispatch, a senior fellow for the American Enterprise Institute, c0-hosting a podcast with Elaina Johnson called Ink-Stained Wretches, and writing a book in 2022, Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back.

Below, a lightly edited transcript of our conversation:

MEDIAITE: You were rather famously at the center of Fox News’ 2020 election reporting, and I know you’ve talked about that in a million interviews and articles, but we’re in a very unique media environment right now where what gets told to audiences and what stories get covered is an issue. I’d like to hear your perspective on leaving Fox and not just having your own show, but having the control over what you chose to report.

STIREWALT: Since I got fired at Fox, that’s been, when was that? That was January of ’21, and it’s March of ’24. So it’s been a minute. I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate. There have been few more salubrious firings than I am aware of than my own, because I’ve found great people and great places.

And I started with The Dispatch, I started with the American Enterprise Institute, I started a podcast with Eliana Johnson — and I found very quickly that the fortunate firing was such a blessing. And, you know, NewsNation — I won’t say that I was not interested. I wasn’t totally uninterested in television, but I was kind of enjoying not doing TV, right? I wrote a book, I did not feel unfulfilled, and I was professionally very happy. And then, [Fox News vice president] Cherie Grzech, left Fox News and went to NewsNation.

So Cherie, with whom I had worked so closely for so many years on debates and election nights and all of that, when she went to NewsNation and she was very busy and very happy and in a position to really shape coverage for the network, she basically told me I had to put my money where my mouth was, and that I was writing books and receiving accolades for my defenses of fair journalism and impartiality and all of that good stuff. And she said, “Are you going to get in and do it? Are you really going to do it?”

And I think, I guess for me, one of the founders — and stop me if you’ve heard this story — but one of the founders of the private equity firm KKR, Jerry Kohlburg, quit very suddenly, it was about 1987, he quit very suddenly, and right as the private equity world was starting to really reach its zenith. He had come up with this model that he thought was a really good purpose. You had these companies that a lot of them were family firms, they were not able to pass on to the next generation, they were kind of stalling out. And private equity could come in and provide capital and turn them back into robust things and  save the company. Then, of course, it turned into something else, which was stripping companies down and selling them for parts and leaving people unemployed with pension funds that were bankrupted. And he quit in a surprise investors meeting. And he said something which was basically an ethic without sacrifice is not an ethic, right?

And the the truth of that is you have to be willing to forego some things if you mean what you say. And I have been impressed by NewsNation because they have been willing to take a longer, harder way to get there than their established competitors.

And what I have found in NewsNation is, for almost all of my time at Fox — I was at Fox for more than ten years — and for the majority of that time, it was great. I had a blast. I worked with a lot of great people. We did a lot of great work. It was fantastic and all of that stuff. And, you know, the rubber hit the road at a certain point and that story ended.

But at NewsNation, I have found a group of people from the top down who understand that it’s harder to do the news in a aspirationally fair, unsensationalized way, without moving into partisan silos. That it’s worth it to take the long way around to profits and not take the shortcut through basically rage revenue.

I’ve found that when I’ve been on some of the NewsNation programs — and obviously I’m biased because Dan Abrams owns Mediaite — but I haven’t felt that the person on the NewsNation side had an angle. And they also showed up having actually read the article I had written and other background info, knowing their stuff, asking more substantive and detailed questions, and not just going for the rage-bait, clickbait talking points. But at the end of the day, we in the media industry have the struggle where if some cable news panel devolves into a shouting match that’s going to be an easier thing to get traffic than writing an analysis about the constitutionality of a bill being debated in Congress.

But what we’re supposed to do is hold good things in tension, right? It is good to develop a large audience. That’s not a bad thing. It is not unto itself bad to be popular. There are many good things that are popular, but being popular is not the same as being good, right? So it’s not bad to be popular. It’s not bad to be successful. But it can’t be — you cannot succeed at the cost of another good thing, which is upholding basic, fundamental rules for journalism, number one, but number two is citizenship, right? There is no American journalism without Americanism. We have to understand that the work that we’re doing, especially when we’re in politics, when we’re talking about politics and government, is that it has to fit into the idea of government, of the people, for the people, and by the people.

So the way that we get into trouble in the news business is when we divorce ourselves, as journalists, from our obligations as Americans, and trying to put those things into separate bins, leads to disaster because the market pressures for cheap, shoddy invective are so profound that if you don’t have an ethic that demands sacrifice from the beginning, you will succumb to it.

There’s been an ongoing debate about bias in journalism and whether this particular website or channel is biased from the left or the right, or whether anything can be trusted, and whether objective journalism is even possible. And I’d love to hear your take on that. My own personal view has been that journalists are human and humans have opinions, so it’s impossible to have purely objective, unbiased journalism. And the solution instead is to have as many voices as possible and to just be upfront about it. What’s your take on it, and specifically how are you hoping to address that debate in your show?

Well, I’m going to try to address that by not asking people for anything. I am not coming to ask people to vote one way or another way. I am not coming to ask people to change their mind about something. I am not coming as an advocate for a point of view — you are very right that, the idea of a sort of pure truth, right? An empirical truth, or the idea of the anti-disinformation carried to its logical extreme is the death of free speech and is the death of discourse, right? Because, once you get past basically the sports scores, and — well, by the time you get to the weather, you’re already in the subjective reporting, you’re already there.

As we learned, even election results, which are numbers, become a battlefield for interpretation. So the idea that a governmental entity or an outside entity is going to come in and impose those things on journalism, not only is not really possible in an absolutely fair way, but it wouldn’t even be good because discourse matters. And being able to have a conversation as a self-governing people is really important.

Now, there’s lots of kinds of journalism. So for example, on this show, we are going to talk to lawmakers and we’re going to talk to decision makers, and we’re going to talk to policy people, and we’re going to have discussions about what’s going on in Congress and what’s going on with campaigns. And we’re going to talk to candidates, and we’re going to talk to lawmakers, and we’re going to talk to people with policy proposals. We’re going to talk to smart people with interesting ideas about how to fix problems. And I’m going to ask them hopefully tough questions, proffered in good faith.

And I have to try to assume from at least the beginning with an interview that the person I’m talking to believes the things that they say they believe, right? It’s okay for me to be skeptical, but I can’t be cynical.

I think there’s a lot of bad faith, tough-sounding questioning, fake tough questioning, that goes on, especially in broadcast media, which is, “Oh, yeah? Well, you say this, but aren’t you really that?” And I don’t think that gets you anywhere. I don’t think coming in and saying you’re not who you say you are, you’re not what you believe.

As a matter of fact, one of the most pernicious problems in American political discourse today is the argument that you hear –predominantly from Republicans, but from both Republicans and Democrats — that what the other people want to do is not address problems in a different way, but instead prefer the problems and like the problems and are trying to destroy the nation from within.

And that’s not only wrong, we know it’s wrong because almost every American wants, certainly those in public life want the same outcomes. They want a healthy country, they want a vibrant country. They want peace and prosperity, and they want all these things. They have different ways of going about it. If you start with the assumption — not only are those people wrong, they’re evil, they’re trying to destroy the country — well, how are you going to come to an agreement on a spending package with a person you say is trying to destroy the nation on purpose?

So one of the things that I think is important for me to do is not be cynical about what other people are doing and engage with them where they are. And that means listening. I think that’s important. But I also treasure and get excited about the fact that, in the analysis portion of this show, when we bring the panel in, we’re doing all journalists, right? We’re not going to do a xylophone of different canned talking points of people trying to advance a position or a party. I think about it this way, when I’m interviewing a politician, that politician wants something. They want to use the platform to reach an audience and get their message out. My job is to interact with them and their message in a way that is skeptical but not cynical, and ask challenging questions, but in a good faith manner. Not to try to own them, but to try to shed light, not heat.

Oh, so we’re not going to see headlines that say “Chris Stirewalt DESTROYS Congressman…”? None of these people have ever been destroyed in the history of all of those headlines. They remain breathing!

And, Sarah, in fact, it’s worse than that because not only are the allegedly destroyed not destroyed, they benefit. Both sides in fake tough questioning. Yeah, because you bring a person on your show and you say, “Won’t you admit that you are a big liar and a terrible doodyhead?” And the person says, “How dare you do that? How dare you say that to me? In fact, you are the liar and the terrible doodyhead.” And what have we learned? We have not learned anything. And the person is not destroyed. In fact, that person has gotten the same thing out of it, that the bad faith questioner got, which is they get to go back to their audience, to their siloed audience, and say, “I fought the bad people. I went and fought the bad people.”

So, that’s to be assiduously avoided. Now, the best part for me is that we’re not going to hear from partizan flacks who are basically coming on to and we see a lot on TV, which is here’s a person who is a Republican operative, a Democratic operative, a spokesperson for a party — those people are not in a good position to provide analysis, right? Because they are reverse engineering their responses.

One of the things that I like to say when people ask me, well, somebody on the red team says that somebody on the blue team is wrong, or somebody says, well, somebody on the blue team says they’re not wrong, in fact, they’re quite right. I say, well, what did you expect him to say? That’s what they’re supposed to say. That’s what they get paid for. That’s what their job is, is to defend the indefensible. And to say why down is up and up is down. And why winning is losing and to come up with a spin.

I don’t begrudge that to them because that is their job. That’s what they do. And I know people who are really good at it, and I also know people who are good at it without being actual liars, right? That they can thread the space in between to spin and make convincing arguments. And I frankly, just as a matter of professional appreciation, I love to see it done well, right? When you watch a really good spinmeister, it’s amazing to see how well they can turn arguments around and do all that stuff. As a piece of performance art, it’s great. For helping people be better citizens, for helping people, better serve the nation that we love, it’s the pits, right? Yeah, because as James Jesus Angleton said, it becomes a “wilderness of mirrors,” right? You are like, okay, am I what am I looking at? Am I looking at the truth, or am I looking at a reflection of the truth reflected in a reflection? And that just doesn’t help.

What I know, though, is that in decades of working in the news business, I have gotten to meet some really extraordinary journalists, and in this case — so this is the longest possible way to answer your question, which is to say, on this panel, you will get to hear from people who are opinion journalists who have a point of view, right? They have beliefs that they are open about and they are out front with. They say, I am a conservative, I am a liberal, I am a progressive, I am whatever, across the spectrum. This is my point of view. And good opinion journalism is good journalism. But the journalist is the one who says I have to defend my case. I have to marshal facts in support of the argument. And I am not aligned with a party. I am not here to carry water. I think you saw a really good example of this with Jon Stewart getting exploded for saying an obviously true thing about Joe Biden, right?

Yeah, that was interesting to see. 

And Democrats yelling at Jon Stewart for saying an obviously true thing about Joe Biden and Jon Stewart said, “What do you think my job is?” Right? “What do you think I’m here to do?” Jon Stewart is a person who has a point of view. He has views. He has opinions. He’s an opinion journalist, basically, right? And he’s providing comment from his point of view, not on behalf of the Democratic National Committee. And that is an important distinction.

So you’ll have people like that on the panel, not Jon Stewart, but you’ll have people who are opinion journalists from different outlets, different organizations, respected people with good track records, of, opinion journalism. But you will also have straight reporters. That’s the other side of the coin from what you were talking about. I think a good reporter is like a juror. You bring yourself to your work. It’s not like you were born yesterday and rediscover the world each and every day. You have biases and experiences that have shaped your worldview, that you bring to the work. But then you say the next thing, which is, I see it all, and now I’m going to try to be fair. And as a matter of fact, a good journalist is one who can see their own biases and try and control for those things harder.

Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug. And it’s very tempting, of course, to say, well, this looks right. It just looks right. It lines up with what I believe in. But a good journalist says, okay, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. So if this lines up too well with what I think, let’s test this one harder. You have to go harder on your own team than you do on the view that you are more prone to disagree with, because of confirmation bias. So a good journalist is not one who is devoid of a worldview, or is offering a platonic ideal of perfect impartiality, but is one who is aspirationally fair, is one who says, okay, I have a job to do here, and it is to report the, as [the poem] goes — “without, or with, offense to friend or foes, I sketch your world exactly as it goes” — and it’s impossible to do perfectly. But it is a good aspiration.

That makes a lot of sense.

With all this in mind, like when you are looking for resources — when there’s a new story breaking or there’s something that’s happening at the Supreme Court, or there’s some political development — who are some of the journalists that if you see their name, scroll across your Twitter feed, you think, oh, let me click on that and see what they have to say, because they’re going to add to my understanding. 

Oh, I read really, really widely. And I try not to be over relying on Twitter. I don’t, well —

Not Twitter specifically, but whose byline could you see pop up, if you Googled and you saw that it was an article by so-and-so, you’d think, oh, that that’s something that is going to help illuminate what’s going on, this is going to be helpful for me to read and not distorting.

Well, certainly. I mean, I am very lucky, working at The Dispatch because The Dispatch has a bevy of excellent reporters and analysts. So that’s, that’s very helpful. And that that’s great. And The Hill, of course, is a good resource because they are churning out so much coverage of politics day in and day out. The sheer volume that The Hill does each day is breathtaking to me. So I have a good home team on that stuff.

What I tell people who ask me about how to be a news consumer, I say, basically, read widely, make sure that you’re not — the silo is easy to get into. Because we don’t like to be challenged and we don’t like to be made uncomfortable. But a very healthy news and analysis diet should include a variety of viewpoints, including ones that you are prone to disagree with.

And I think when we look at somebody like, let’s say, Matt Yglesias. So here is a person who is a man of the left and has his credentials, but he is willing to challenge orthodoxies. That always impresses me. We could go down a long list and I’m not going to try to name every name, but I have special respect for people who are willing to call balls and strikes on their own team. That’s a real hard thing to do because there are penalties for it, right? So if you are an analyst or an opinion journalist who is willing to argue against your own team, I give that special attention because it’s going to be more interesting.

Those people are going to find interesting wrinkles, right? If you ask The Wall Street Journal editorial board to tell you what’s wrong with Elizabeth Warren’s proposal, it’s probably not going to be that interesting because they’re going to be able to stop after the first thing, they can say that disqualifies this idea, and we don’t need to look much deeper than this. And they may turn up the amplitude on the criticism of the problem. They may focus in on one thing and really blow it up, but I’m not going to learn a great deal. On the other hand, if I see that Matt Yglesias has a critique of what Elizabeth Warren is proposing — this is just a hypothetical — of what Elizabeth Warren is proposing, I’m going to get more out of that because he’s going to approach it in a different way. Conversely, if The Nation says that something that Senate Republicans have put forward is bad, I’m not learning a great deal. But if I read a piece from Kevin Williamson that breaks down what the problems are from a conservative point of view, I’m going to learn a lot more.

What’s your advice for people who are trying to get into the journalism industry and make a name for themselves and move up, because there is that path there of doing outrageous things and having the TikToks and videos where you’re chasing down somebody and you’re doing something outrageous, and now you have a million views, and there’s a monetization of that. What are the ways to actually manage to, you know, pay your rent and move forward without getting involved in all of the nonsense? 

Well, one of the things that we have to really get back to and we really have to think about is local, the value of local first.

Yes!

And when I say local first, I mean local first for consumers, but also local first for journalists. You’re a lot better off if you can start in a local market, because you are going to get a lot more lessons in accountability, because you are closer to what you’re covering. There’s a real problem with the dehumanization that comes through national media, because who are we really talking about? These aren’t real people. And destroying somebody, leading a rage mob against somebody — it’s a lot easier when it’s a stranger.

If you can start local, right, and you can learn your craft locally, and get your vocational training closer to people, not only are you going to be more accountable and learn about accountability, you are going to learn about human nature in a much better laboratory, right? The things that I learned covering the county commission in Wheeling, West Virginia, are just as applicable to the Senate of the United States or presidential election as they are to anything else, because human nature is immutable. People are the same, and have the same glories and defects at the local level as they do at the state level, as they do at the national level, as they do at the international level. You have to learn different filigree to put around those things, but if you can start local, you can get an education both about yourself and about human nature that will serve you very well through the process.

Let me just close by asking, not to name any names, but when you’re putting together your ideal show with your team for the coming weeks and months and years, for both the political guests that you’re inviting and the panel of journalists, obviously that’s going to be partly driven by what’s in the current news cycles, but in a general, broad sense, what are the criteria for who you think will be good guests?

Well, talking points are the first enemy. We live in an era where you can have access to talking points anytime you want, and every American can parrot the same talking points as any politician. There’s no barrier to entry for political B.S., right? So what we’re looking for — and I think this is true of the newsmakers, the issue advocate people, as well as the panelists — is they’re going to speak frankly, they’re going to speak openly, and they’re going to come with some humility. That they are not there just to proselytize, but that they’re there to have a frank conversation.

All right. Is there anything else that I didn’t ask about or cover that you want people to know about the show?

This has been — I did not know that I would get to quote poetry and talk about the priorities of journalistic integrity in this interview — and it’s a treat.

The Hill Sunday with Chris Stirewalt airs on Sundays at 10 am ET/9 am CT on NewsNation and, starting on April 7, on The CW.

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