Fox News Contributors Make a Stand for Truth with Principled Resignations - Horowitz

Fox News Contributors Make a Stand for Truth with Principled Resignations - Horowitz

When opinion becomes unmoored from facts and is riddled with disinformation and falsehoods designed to provoke, it veers into dangerous propaganda.  During the Trump presidency and its aftermath, too many of the opinion hosts on Fox News  Channel (FNC) with its prime-time hosts, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham as the worst offenders, moved from sharp opinion commentary that was at least somewhat grounded in facts and reality to creating their own alternative realities or echoing and amplifying Mr. Trump’s falsehoods.

For long-time Fox News contributors, Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes, the final straw was the streaming on Fox Nation of Patriot Purge, Tucker Carlson’s series on the events of January 6. The series is rife with propaganda and willful distortions, produced in a naked attempt to re-brand as “true patriots” the insurrectionists who invaded the Capitol, violently attacking the police officers that stood in their way in an effort to block the routine certification of a free and fair election and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

Spelling out the reasons for their resignations in a joint post on The Dispatch website, where they both serve as editors, Goldberg and Hayes accurately described Patriot Purge as “a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions.”  The two anti-Trump conservatives who founded The Dispatch to do fact-based reporting from a conservative point of view added: “And its message is clear: The U.S. government is targeting patriotic Americans in the same manner —and with the same tools—that it used to target al Qaeda”. 

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Goldberg and Hayes called this kind of propaganda dangerous, pointing to the insurrection on January 6, stemming from President Trump’s repeated falsehoods about a stolen election that were amplified by Carlson and other Fox opinion hosts, as a prime example of its potential consequences.

The two conservatives, who appeared regularly on Special Report with Bret Baier, Fox News’ signature daily hard news program, praised the network's hard news reporters for doing solid, fact-based reporting and acknowledged there are constructive and insightful opinion commenters and hosts who remain on FNC.  They accurately claimed, however, it was no longer the dominant strain: “Fox News still does real reporting, and there are still responsible conservatives providing valuable opinion and analysis,” wrote the former Fox News contributors. "But, the voices of the responsible are being drowned out by the irresponsible.”

 Goldberg and Hayes view the airing of Carlson’s fantasy version of January 6 as the ramping up of an existing trend—not as a one-off that could be more easily dismissed.  “Over the past five years, some of Fox’s top opinion hosts amplified the false claims and bizarre narratives of Donald Trump or offered up their own in his service. In this sense, the release of Patriot Purge wasn’t an isolated incident, it was merely the most egregious example of a longstanding trend.” 

Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes are sacrificing money and the visibility that comes with appearances on the nation’s top-rated cable news network to make a stand for truth.  While I am doubtful that their principled resignations will cause Fox News to change direction, by calling attention to the dangers of amplifying falsehoods and greenlighting propaganda these two principled conservatives are performing a valuable public service and adhering to the highest ideals of their profession.

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services, and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island