Former Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt has claimed a US senator tried to get him fired after the network correctly called Arizona for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
Mr Stirewalt went on air to defend the call, which Fox News made long before other media organisations. It signalled Donald Trump had lost a key state in his quest for re-election.
“The viewers of Fox News were incredibly angry,” Mr Stirewalt told CNN Tonight on Thursday.
“I had one US senator call for my firing and said we were engaged in a coverup. I thought, ‘Are there ballots under the table I haven’t looked at? What are you talking about?’”
He didn’t identify the senator.
The decision to call Arizona for Mr Biden just before midnight EST on election night 2020 as he was leading by nine percentage points prompted a furious response from the Trump campaign team.
Jared Kushner phoned Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch to object as hundreds of thousands of votes were still outstanding.
“The shocking projection brought our momentum to a screeching halt”, Mr Kushner wrote in his new memoir.
The Associated Press projected the state would go to Biden around three hours after Fox’s call, while decision desks at the other main networks waited until nine days later to decide.
Mr Stirewalt told CNN Tonight’s Laura Coatesthat Fox viewers had been conditioned to believe that Mr Trump was incapable of losing the election.
“They had been so deceived and they had been so flattered and they had been so coddled over the years that when the ice cream dish was taken away... they were not ready for that,” he said.
In testimony before the January 6 House committee in June, Mr Stirewalt said Mr Trump had used a “red mirage” to stoke the false conspiracy that the election was rigged against him.
Mr Stirewalt is promoting his new book Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back.
In it he warns that his former employer is promoting “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred”.
