NewsNation’s Chris Stirewalt Hopes to Crack Sunday-Talk Market
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Chris Stirewalt, the garrulous political analyst, is best known, perhaps, for his tenure at Fox News Channel. He’s ready to make a name for himself in a new venue.
Stirewalt famously spent time on screen defending Fox News early — and eerily accurate — projection during the 2020 presidential election that then-President Donald Trump would lose in Arizona, a key state. By the time President Biden was ready to take his oath of office, Stirewalt had exited the Fox Corp. news unit after a decade-long run, fully prepared to put his TV news career in the rearview mirror.
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On Sunday, he will have to look in the cameras once again.
Stirewalt is set to anchor “The Hill Sunday,” a bid by upstart cable-news player NewsNation to insert itself into the Sunday-news field typically dominated by decades-old programs with strong video imprimaturs. The anchor believes viewers still yearn for something that tones down the red-versus-blue bickering that has become a bigger part of analysis and opinion programming.
“The underserved portion of the American news market are folks who are not looking for an emotional attachment or partisan cues for how to consume their news,” he says. “They are looking for something that seems like it’s trying to be fair, and I think that it’s a harder way to make a buck in the news business, for sure,” he adds, but “there is a lot left on the table in terms of Americans who have mostly tuned out the news because it’s just too much.”
“The Hill Sunday” — NewsNation also runs a weekday version of the program devoted to discussions among a panel – plans to feature both interviews with newsmakers, says Stirewalt, along with a panel of contributors that producers hope will at times surprise the audience. “You’ll see folks from ‘The Hill,’ from NewsNation, but you will also see people from our competitors and from around the media world” says Stirewalt. “Some of them are very famous names and some of them are new to a lot of people but have an interesting voice and good perspective.” He declined to reveal any names.
Executives at NewsNation, part of Nexstar Media, hope the Sunday program gives it more of a hook into weekend news viewing. The network has been working since its 2021 launch to build out a seven-days-a-week schedule. And while its overall audience is significantly smaller than those of its longer-lived cable-news rivals, the company has been encouraged by some of the viewership increases it has notched. In a bid to gain Stirewalt more of a following, Nexstar will starting on April 7 make his show available to its CW stations to run in their schedules.
“That’s another opportunity to make our case to burned-out disaffected news consumers, “ says Stirewalt. “They can dip their toes back into national pollical coverage and not feel like they have to take a shower afterwards.”
Still, Sunday news aficionados have a lot of water to sample — and already do so. Shows such as NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and CBS News’ “Face The Nation” have been around for decades. One of their younger rivals, ABC’s “This Week,” originally led by David Brinkley, debuted in 1981. “Fox News Sunday” arrived in 1996 — and is seen via both the Fox broadcast network and on Fox News Channel — and CNN’s “State of the Union” started in 2009. The broadcast-only programs typically snare between 2 million and 3 million viewers each week.
The Sunday shows have become something of an old boys’ club — even though most of them are anchored or co-anchored by female correspondents. The programs “are a pretty staid and tired genre, predictable in their performative fencing between journalists and guests,” says Mark Feldstein, who oversees the broadcast journalism program at the University of Maryland. But they remain “convenient venues for politicians to reach the public, and occasionally those politicians make news on those programs, deliberately or inadvertently.”
Stirewalt thinks the programs have a more important mission — their original one. “The Sunday show mandate was to give people a chance to hear or interact with politicians. Whoa, now you can hardly escape hearing a politico talk,” he says. Still, “I do believe that ambition remains true and remains important,” he adds. “We are going to aim high. We are going to try to do something that helps Americans to be better citizens.”
This isn’t where Stirewalt expected to find himself. After his stint at Fox News ended, he turned to writing, publishing the 2022 book “Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back.” But he says he realized that “I didn’t start out in TV.” Though the medium is “fun,” he says, he thought to himself that “maybe TV isn’t going be part of my story.”
Someone at NewsNation thought he had another chapter. Cherie Grzech had supervised Fox News’ political coverage for years and moved to NewsNation as its launch was underway. She told Stirewalt he had an opportunity at the start-up network to put into practice what he preached in his book. “Basically she dared me to put my money where my mouth is,” he recalls.
He thinks NewsNation’s process, which relies heavily on contributions from Nexstar’s large cohort of local stations, is a good place to make a stand. “News bias and political slinging is not usual for local TV news,” he notes, and the closer relationship with stations “keeps NewsNation and Nexstar closer to that energy.”
Stirewalt may not have the biggest audience this Sunday, but he says that’s OK. “There’s a real privilege in getting to start something new — partly because I hope to benefit from low expectations,” he quips.
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