Monday, November 22, 2021

Two Fox News commentators resign over Tucker Carlson series on the Jan. 6 siege

Fox News host Tucker Carlson's special on the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol was the last straw for two network commentators. Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg have resigned.

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

In separate interviews with NPR, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg pointed to a breaking point earlier this month: network star Tucker Carlson's three-part series on the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol that 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 War on Terror 2.0," Goldberg tells NPR. "It traffics in all manner of innuendo and conspiracy theories that I think legitimately could lead to violence. That for me, and for Steve, was the last straw."

Hayes has been a close friend of Fox News political anchor Bret Baier since their college days at DePauw University; both he and Goldberg were mainstays of Baier's Special Report since 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 reflect larger tumult within Fox News over Carlson's series "Patriot Purge" and his increasingly strident stances, and over the network's willingness to let its opinion stars make false, paranoid claims against President Biden, his administration and his supporters.

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

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