After the Fox News Arizona call, Chris Stirewalt sends the NewsNation 2024 plan

Four years ago, Chris Stirewalt was at the center of a political firestorm.

As a member of the Fox News Decision Team, he spent 2020 election night working with other data nerds to decide when states could be called for Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

It was Fox’s call for Arizona, made much earlier than its competitors, that roiled the campaign and became a major news story in its own right, with repercussions felt across the political and media landscape.

Before 2024, Stirewalt won’t be in a backroom. He will take center stage as an on-air analyst for NewsNationthe upstart cable news channel owned by local TV giant Nexstar.

This time, he wants to bring viewers into the room to try to reverse-engineer how TV networks have called elections for most of the last 75 years.

“There was a kind Wizard of Oz component, that in another room, in another place, there were magical beings doing this job of predicting the outcome of presidential elections,” Stirewalt says. The Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t think that works in our fragmented and atomized media world, without giants still ruling the earth. I think you have to show people what you’re doing, and I think you have to be transparent about what’s going on.”

So Stirewalt and NewsNation plan to pull back the curtain and, unlike what the other networks are doing, will forgo internal forecasting entirely. Instead, NewsNation will have Decision Desk HQ calling. They will be completely independent of NewsNation, but the station will have cameras in their offices at Georgetown Law School, allowing viewers and anchors (including Chris Cuomo, Elizabeth Vargas and Leland Vittert) to see what they are doing.

Stirewalt suggests it’s a setup that will provide a marked contrast to other TV networks with their own in-house teams.

“It was a bit of a challenge for me personally because I like to be involved, right? This is what I love. I have been participating in elections since 2010 and this will be the first election since then that I am not in the procession, helping to call and being part of it,” he says. “But I think this is better. I think it’s better, because if you want to make sure that commercial, mercenary, or partisan sentiments don’t influence the way races are mentioned, it helps if you just keep it clean, keep it separate. They are there. They do their thing. We can talk to them. We can view them. We can ask them questions, we can do all those things, but they’re going to do what they’re going to do, and we’re going to report on it, and we’re going to try to provide context and explanation. .”

There’s actually precedent for what could go wrong, and Stirewalt saw it firsthand. As has now been well documented, members of President Trump’s inner circle tried to pressure Fox to change its call in Arizona. In the end, of course, Fox did not withdraw its call on Arizona and Biden won the state.

But in a competitive TV news landscape, NewsNation’s political editor is also betting that his style of election coverage will resonate, a tough bar to surpass given the partisanship that dominates cable news.

“Personality drives a lot of television news, argumentation, spin and attempts to defeat spin drive much of what we see on television. But this is the week where the nerds rule, where there is no need to spin anymore,” says Stirewalt. “When the polls close and it’s all over but the count, people’s opinions don’t matter so much anymore. We are beyond convincing and motivating, and now we must try to tell people what happened and tell them what happened accurately and as quickly as possible.

“I think America wants to know, and I think we can meet them where they are, and instead of continuing to try to twist them or put on talking heads to calm them down, we can tell them what’s going on hand,” he said. adds.

And it could be a make-or-break moment for NewsNation, too. 2024 will be the station’s first as a 24-hour news network (the station rebranded from WGN America in 2021), and in a moment of media tumult, Stirewalt seems to think there is an audience that wants what NewsNation is selling.

“I don’t know how big of an audience there is in America that wants honest news and doesn’t like being spoiled, flattered and lied to, but it’s not zero,” he says.

“I think if we can be transparent and independent, we will have done a lot of good for ourselves and hopefully for the country,” he added. “Election coverage is an opportunity for NewsNation to deliver on the promise, the idea, that there is a significantly underserved market for Americans who want their news removed from partisan political silos. And if there’s ever a time when people want that, it should be an election where normal people don’t have to be comforted or misled when it comes time to count votes. What they should want, or what I hope they want, is to be treated like adults, and I think we can do that.