Why Is Tucker Carlson Gone Again?

Fob News host Tucker Carlson'south special on the Jan. half-dozen riot at the U.S. Capitol was the last straw for two network commentators. Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg have resigned. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption

Scrap Somodevilla/Getty Images

Fox News host Tucker Carlson'southward special on the Jan. 6 anarchism at the U.S. Capitol was the last straw for ii network commentators. Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg accept resigned.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Two longtime conservative Fox News commentators have resigned in protest of what they call a pattern of incendiary and fabricated claims past the network's stance hosts in support of former President Donald Trump.

In split up interviews with NPR, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg pointed to a breaking point this month: network star Tucker Carlson's three-office series on the Jan. six siege of the U.S. Capitol, which relied on fabrications and conspiracy theories to exonerate the Trump supporters who participated in the attack.

"It's basically saying that the Biden regime is coming after half the country and this is the State of war on Terror 2.0," Goldberg tells NPR. "It traffics in all manner of allusion and conspiracy theories that I retrieve legitimately could lead to violence. That for me, and for Steve, was the last straw."

Hayes has been a shut friend of Play a joke on News political anchor Bret Baier since their college days at DePauw University; both he and Goldberg were mainstays of Baier'due south Special Report after joining the network in 2009. Together, Hayes and Goldberg co-founded the conservative news site The Dispatch.

According to five people with direct knowledge, the resignations reverberate larger tumult within Fox News over Carlson's serial Patriot Purge and his increasingly strident stances, and over the network's willingness to permit its opinion stars make false, paranoid claims against President Biden, his administration and his supporters.

Senior Fox News journalists warned network executives

Veteran figures on Fox'southward news side, including political anchors Baier and Chris Wallace, shared their objections with Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and its president of news, Jay Wallace. Those objections rose to Lachlan Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of the network'southward parent company, Fox Corp. Through a senior spokeswoman, Scott and Wallace declined annotate. Murdoch did non render a request for comment through a spokesman. A senior Fox News executive subsequently said the two contributors' contracts would non have been picked up later on their scheduled expiration next year.

Goldberg says that he had been bodacious by Fox's news leaders that, equally Trump left Washington, D.C., post-obit his ballot defeat, the network would tamp down on incendiary commentary and claims.

Jonah Goldberg and his partner at The Dispatch website, Stephen Hayes, quit their roles as commentators for Play a joke on News after Tucker Carlson'due south special on the Jan. 6 riot aired. The Washington Post via Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption

The Washington Postal service via Getty Images

Jonah Goldberg and his partner at The Dispatch website, Stephen Hayes, quit their roles every bit commentators for Flim-flam News later on Tucker Carlson's special on the Jan. half dozen riot aired.

The Washington Post via Getty Images

Instead, Goldberg says, the determination by Play a trick on'south ballot analysts to be the first to project that Biden would win Arizona on election nighttime last November led the network'southward stars, including Carlson, to demonstrate their dedication to Trump and his most adamant fans. And that led Fox's stance stars to embrace increasingly indefensible positions, Goldberg argues. (Fob News is currently facing 2 multibillion-dollar lawsuits from voting technology companies alleging they were defamed past network hosts and guests who supported Trump's grandiose and faux claims of election fraud. Fox has filed motions to dismiss both lawsuits.)

Trick News also jettisoned the leaders of its political desk-bound, laid off a bunch of researchers and installed a new opinion hour at vii p.m., shifting news anchor Martha MacCallum from that time to a less visible midafternoon slot. The news anchor at xi p.k., Shannon Bream, was pushed dorsum to midnight in favor of Greg Gutfeld's opinion-driven comedy show. All these moves tilted the channel to even more Trump-friendly content, even as its news programs gently tried to correct the record on the 2022 elections and the siege.

"It was irresponsible to put that out into the public airwaves"

Carlson'south serial on the Capitol insurrection aired on Fox's paid streaming service, Trick Nation, in early November.

"They've begun to fight a new enemy in a new state of war on terror," Carlson warned his viewers in the first episode. "Not, you lot should sympathize, a metaphorical war, simply an actual war, soldiers and paramilitary agencies hunting downwardly American citizens."

Promotional videos for the series that aired on Fox News late the calendar week before set off loud alarm bells throughout the network.

"I thought information technology was irresponsible to put that out into the public airwaves," Hayes says.

"The trailer [for the serial] basically gave people the impression that the U.South. government was coming later on all patriots — half of the country, in the give-and-take of one of the protagonists in the piece," he says. "And that the federal government was going to exist using the tools and tactics that it used to get afterwards al-Qaida. And that's not happening. That's not true."

"Information technology's a narrative that's contradicted by certainly the vast drove of legal documents charging those who participated in January sixth, the broad reporting by a wide diversity of news outlets on what happened on January sixth so and in the time since, and contradicted in part past Flim-flam News' own news site and the reporting that people on the news side have washed," he said.

Asked for annotate for this story, Carlson said the difference of the 2 "will substantially improve the aqueduct."

He also mocked the two men for denouncing him for propounding conspiracy theories: "These are ii of the simply people in the world who still pretend the Iraq War was a adept idea," Carlson wrote to NPR. "No i wants to watch commentary that stupid."

Carlson declined to comment virtually the objections of other prominent journalists at the network.

News programs distance themselves from Carlson's series on the air

Viewers could see Fox'south prominent journalists altitude themselves from Carlson's serial without mentioning his name.

On the Friday earlier the release of Patriot Purge, Baier aired a segment on the investigation of the coup by veteran national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin. Featured interviews dismissed claims of a "false-flag set on" — that is, fierce left-fly activists such equally antifa pretending to be Trump fans equally they attacked the Capitol.

Wallace broadcast an interview on Fox News Lord's day with Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, 1 of the chief Republican critics of Trump who's similarly rejecting those false claims. She is one of just two GOP members of the House committee investigating the insurrection at the Capitol.

Patriot Purge relied on known peddlers of unfounded conspiracy theories, people who sought out the visitor of white supremacists who would not be cited as credible sources by Fox'southward reporting teams.

Goldberg said he and Hayes could no longer tolerate the wild claims beamed, circulate and streamed on Play tricks News.

"Being a Fox correspondent is kind of a brass ring in bourgeois and right-wing circles, and I was well compensated," Goldberg says. "I'1000 not looking to be a martyr or ask for pity or whatsoever of that kind of stuff. Only it's a pregnant financial hit for sure. And it's also cutting yourself off from a very large audition."

"We don't regret the decision. But we found it regrettable that we had to make the decision."

Hayes and Goldberg were formerly pinnacle editors at The Weekly Standard and the National Review, respectively. They recently joined forces to institute the bourgeois anti-Trump site The Dispatch. Hayes, the outlet'southward founding CEO and editor, and Goldberg, its editor-in-principal, say the site is intended to appeal to conservatives with commentary and news grounded squarely in fact.

"We launched The Dispatch in part to model behavior we thought was increasingly missing on the right, particularly in conservative media," Goldberg says. He says the online magazine is not "beholden to a partisan agenda, not looking to simply monetize dopamine hits past making people aroused."

liedtkebostersair89.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/11/21/1052837157/fox-resignations-tucker-carlson-patriot-purge-documentary

Share this post