Jonah Goldberg on the Real Reason He Left Fox News: Backing Trump ‘Requires You To Lie’

It’s not easy leaving Fox News, the biggest news network on television and the biggest platform for conservative views, perhaps, in history. Yet in the years since his self-imposed exile from the network, journalist Jonah Goldberg has launched The Dispatch — a remarkably influential upstart media company — and improbably landed at CNN.

The son of Lucianne Goldberg — a central figure in the Monica Lewinsky scandal — Jonah first made his name as a sharp-edged conservative polemicist. His best-selling book Liberal Fascism cemented his reputation as a witty, often venomous critic of the left.

But his style was more in the satirical lineage of P.J. O’Rourke than the scorched-earth pugilism that later came to define the discourse. Looking back, it feels like a healthier, more ironic era of trolling, when conservatives were still cultural underdogs in the post-Clinton landscape, and before Fox News rose into the dominant primordial beast of the media right.

Goldberg helped launch National Review Online, still a touchstone for traditional conservatives in an era when Donald Trump stolen the GOP from the tradition of William F. Buckley. He became a fixture on Fox News, appearing regularly on the “All-Star Panel” at the close of the 6 p.m. hour — first under Brit Hume, and then later under Bret Baier.

But unlike so many conservative pundits who reinvented themselves to accommodate Trumpism, Goldberg did something rare: he stuck to his principles. He remains deeply conservative, but refused to spin Trump’s policies for partisan expediency, even at the potential expense of his own career trajectory.

That independence ultimately cost him his perch at Fox. Along with Stephen Hayes, his fellow conservative and Dispatch co-founder, Goldberg resigned in protest over Tucker Carlson’s conspiratorial “documentary” Patriot Purge. Fox downplayed their exit, claiming their contracts were soon to lapse. But for Goldberg, remaining at a news outlet that would publish such lies was a line he would not cross — another reminder of his unusual place in today’s fractured media landscape.

The Tucker saga was the final straw. But in the earliest days of the “stolen election” conspiracy theory that Trump was spewing and Fox was promoting in the wake of the 2020 election, it was Goldberg who shot the claim down on air, calling it a (sanitized for broadcast) “insane bat guano conspiracy theory.” He accused Trump of actually trying to steal the election with his baseless claims, and made a point to counter Mollie Hemingway, the wacky conspiracist who still, by the way, regularly graces Fox News airwaves. These were the final days of Goldberg’s time at Fox.

Goldberg has alleged that many of his former Fox News colleagues are dishonest about their Trump support. When I asked him about how that world has shifted, he spoke about how he was able to “wear a lot of hats” prior to Trump. Republican, conservative, free market advocate, etc. The Republican Party was a rather big tent of positions.

“What Trump did to the GOP and to the American right to a large extent was say, you got to take all of your hats off, but one,” Goldberg told me. “And for a lot of people, the hat they refused to take off was the Republican hat. Not the conservative hat, not the right-winger hat, not the intellectual hat. They had to be a team player.”

“They had to be on board with the the the Trump stuff and that’s fine but if it requires you to lie about things,” he told me. “I think a lot of journalistic ethics stuff is Columbia J school guild bullshit, but one of the things I think is about 80, 90 percent of journalistic ethics can be covered simply by this rule: Do not say or write things you do not believe to be true.”

After leaving Fox, Goldberg and Hayes launched The Dispatch, a principled and fact-based conservative outlet that acts as an antidote to the kind of obsequious and fact-flexible commentary that dominates Trump-era media. He is a frequent contributor on CNN, particularly on Jake Tapper’s The Lead, where he provides the very same conservative insight he has long been known for, but with a heavy dose of humor, and less political trolling, which he says he has given up.

I asked him about that gentler tone. “I used to have an idea of where the line was and I would make jokes at the line a lot,” he said. “And now that line has gone so much further out there beyond being funny to just being assholes, right? The triumph, the cultural and sociological triumph of trolling, which is just dickishness for dickishness’ sake, is something I’m totally uninterested in.”

What he is interested in his are his dogs, Zoe and Pippa, whose walks and post-walk rests he chronicles on social media to the delight of his fans.

“I think one of the reasons why the dog stuff is so popular and not just mine, just dog stuff in general, is it’s one of the last areas that is really immune to politics and culture war stuff generally, right?” Goldberg explained. “It’s just like dogs do not care how many followers you have. They don’t care who you voted for.”

He’s right. It’s lovely and disarming tradition that has grown more popular as the rest of X seems to devolve into a sewer of divisive anger, insults and much worse. Like much of the political discourse of late, unless Goldberg’s dogs can save us.

Watch the full interview above, via Mediaite’s YouTube.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.