Two conservative Fox News pundits quit

Conspiracy-riddled docuseries was final straw for contributors

Two longtime Fox News commentators, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, have cut ties with the cable news giant over a recent documentary series that cast doubt about whether a violent insurrection really occurred on Jan 6.

The “Patriot Purge” series, which aired this month on the Fox Nation streaming service, featured several rioters who floated an unfounded conspiracy theory that the federal government facilitated the storming of the U.S. Capitol to entrap supporters of Donald Trump. Fox’s decision to air the series drew bipartisan backlash — and it was the final straw for Goldberg and Hayes, they said.

The series “is a collection of incoherent conspiracymongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, halftruths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions,” Goldberg and Hayes wrote in a blog post Sunday night, concluding that “the voices of the responsible are being drowned out by the irresponsible” at Fox News.

Goldberg and Hayes joined Fox in 2009 as paid contributors, appearing regularly to offer commentary and analysis, but their role in the broader media ecosystem — and their positioning on the network’s ideological spectrum — had changed in the intervening years. After lengthy careers in conservative media — Goldberg spent 21 years at National Review, and Hayes served as the top editor at The Weekly Standard — they emerged as critics of Donald Trump and found themselves on a small island with other conservative dissenters during his administration.

They joined forces in 2019 and started the Dispatch, a digital news and commentary site that approaches national politics from a center-right perspective.

But that willingness to criticize Trump put them at odds with Fox’s prime-time stars, who remain largely supportive of the former president as he weighs a possible 2024 campaign.

Their recent appearances were mostly limited to straight-news hours.

“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,” Goldberg and Hayes wrote, though they offered praise for the network’s news anchors and reporters — “the people who put the ‘news’ in Fox News.”

A Fox News executive said the network had not planned to re-sign Goldberg and Hayes when their contract expired next year.