Jonah Goldberg Reveals ‘Huge Share’ of Fox Pundits Are Dishonest About Their Trump Support: ‘I Didn’t Want to be Complicit in So Many Lies’
Former Fox News contributor Jonah Goldberg revealed in a scathing new op-ed that many pro-Trump hosts at Fox News are dishonest about their support for the former president.
Goldberg made headlines weeks ago when he and fellow Fox contributor Stephen Hayes left the network in protest of its post-election coverage and Patriot Purge, Tucker Carlson’s conspiracy-theory-riddled series on the storming of the U.S. Capitol. Fox News said after the resignations that it did not plan on renewing Hayes and Goldberg’s contracts.
“I felt conflicted about speaking freely,” Goldberg wrote in a new piece published by The Dispatch.
“Fox understandably doesn’t like to pay people who criticize Fox or its talent, and there is something unseemly about it,” he wrote. “That was one reason why I left. Another was that I didn’t want to be complicit in so many lies.”
Goldberg went on to say “I never deliberately lied on Fox,” but he felt like he was becoming complicit in “a series of lies of omission” at the network. He also spoke of how he was a first-hand witness to “dishonest” people at Fox who would cheer for Trump publicly, but would take a significantly different perspective in private.
I know that a huge share of the people you saw on TV praising Trump were being dishonest. I don’t merely suspect it, I know it, because they would say one thing to my face or in my presence and another thing when the cameras and microphones were flipped on. And even when I didn’t hear it directly, I was often one degree of separation from it.
The piece comes days after Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) publicly disclosed text messages from Fox News hosts who begged former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to have Trump call off his rioting supporters on Jan. 6.
The texts included one from Laura Ingraham, and Goldberg noted that while the Fox host clearly saw Trump as the reason for the violence that day, she never blamed him on her show:
The central truth of the texts isn’t that what the mob was doing was condemnable, but that Trump was responsible for the condemnable behavior. By the time the cameras went on, Laura was still willing to condemn the president’s mob, but not the president. And if you read the transcript, much of the show was dedicated to rationalizing the mob’s behavior, with various GOP congressmen changing the subject to the supposed real outrage of the stolen election.
“The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Ingraham wrote in her text to Meadows. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
In the months that followed, Ingraham did her best to downplay the violence. Goldberg wrote:
“No reasonable person thinks that what happened on January 6 was, as Biden said, the worst attack on the Capitol since the Civil War,” she said last July. “Come on, guys. Buffalo head guy was poised to take over the U.S. Government? Are you kidding me? We’ve had many protests, many riots in American history. We had many last year that were far worse than this.” When Capitol police testified before Congress, she dismissed it all by giving out “Best Performance” awards like they were all actors. And she said the police had “no one to blame but themselves” for letting the mob inside the perimeter.
That’s not what she was texting Mark Meadows.
