In fact, Democrats lost seats and will only preserve their majority by the slimmest of margins. Just like with Arizona, Fox refused to retract its forecast, with Bret Baier only admitting the flub 8 days later.

At another point during the broadcast, anchor Bret Baier mentioned to Washington correspondent Chris Stirewalt that polls of the election appeared to be way off. Ludicrously, Stirewalt disputed the point, insisting that pre-election polls were “good.” Of course, the polls were not good and it was obvious from the earliest moments of Election Night. Polling averages showed Trump down slightly in Florida, but he romped to an easy 3-point win. Small polling leads in Iowa, Ohio, and Texas all turned into big Trump wins. And of course, in the Midwest states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, absurd polls showing Trump down 10+ points were exposed as shams as Trump built huge election-night leads in all three states. But at Fox News, Stirewalt was lecturing viewers that they were too stupid to understand the metrics.

That was the tone throughout the night. Even as results indicated Trump was massively 

outperforming polls and threatening to win, Chris Wallace dragged out those same polls to downplay any possibility of a Trump win. While Fox raced to call Arizona for Biden, it showed no similar urgency to call Florida for Trump. Instead, Wallace explained that the state didn’t matter, and then pivoted to reading off discredited polling data to explain why Trump was going to lose.

On Sunday, as White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany described the administration’s plans to continue challenging alleged voter fraud, Neil Cavuto imitated MSNBC and CNN by cutting away from the press conference, explaining that he couldn’t “in good countenance (sic) continue showing” viewers the claims their president was making.

In the days after the election, Fox only further alienated its viewers. That Saturday, as media outlets began calling the presidential race for Joe Biden, Chris Wallace delivered a minute-long extemporaneous sermon explaining that the race was over because the media had anointed Biden the winner, and thus “momentum” made legal challenges over fraud irrelevant.

Then, on Monday, America’s Newsroom anchor Sandra Smith was caught on a hot mic ridiculing a guest who suggested Biden might have benefited from voter fraud.

This is far more than Fox merely taking a skeptical attitude toward Donald Trump’s post-election efforts. This is a network whose personnel are reveling in their contempt for the network’s own viewers.

What is happening?

Fox’s news team doesn’t seem to understand the role it fills in the media ecosystem. Fox should, of course, try to be an objective news outlet. It should report truthfully and not traffic in propaganda. But it is not, and should not try to be, a neutral news outlet, in the sense of trying to appeal equally to all segments of America. Fox is a channel whose target audience is the American right, tens of millions of people whose values, interests, and perspectives are ignored and denigrated by virtually every other major media entity in the country. Fox isn’t “Fair and Balanced” because it is the only neutral media outlet. It is “Fair and Balanced” because it offers a conservative outlook to contrast with the liberal domination everywhere else.

Fox is flailing right now. And everybody can see it.