When Chris Stirewalt saw rioters attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was a reporter for Fox News, which was trying to recover from a slump in the ratings in the weeks after President Donald J. Trump lost his reelection campaign.
Two months later, Mr Stirewalt was fired by Fox, where he had been on the air regularly as a political editor.
The network gave no public reason for his resignation. But Mr. Stirewalt, who before his impeachment was one of the shrinking news reporters who had left Fox News, was on the team that decided to call Arizona shortly before midnight on Election Day in 2020 for Joseph R. Biden Jr. declaring the race over days before the results would be settled.
On Monday, he discussed how he and members of the Fox News Decision Desk relied on hard data to make that call, which angered Mr. Trump and dulled his ability to falsely claim he had won.
In the days after the election, Mr. Stirewalt was one of the Fox personalities who took to the air to defend the call when Mr. Trump attacked the network, and his supporters voted with their remotes and switched to Fox rivals such as Newsmax. and the An America News Network.
Mr Stirewalt described the decision as the result of a careful and rigorous internal process. “We are careful with calling,” he said the day after the election. “That’s why we have those protocols — so we can make good calls and they’ll get up.”
Since his ouster, Mr Stirewalt has become an outspoken critic of his former employer and what he has described as an information bubble doing Trump supporters a disservice. He called the idea that fraud cost Mr Trump the election a “lie” and said the former president’s initial success was due in part to the “informational malnutrition” of his supporters.
In an opinion article for The Los Angeles Times, which he wrote shortly after leaving Fox, Mr Stirewalt said he hoped the truth would prevail. But he acknowledged that after seeing what happened on Jan. 6, he was doubtful that that would “come soon enough if outlets have the resources to satisfy every unhealthy craving of their consumers.”