For five years, the journalists Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg have gone viral for their anti-Trump rants on Fox News… but that’s about to change.
On Monday, they each cut their ties with the network. They cited their contempt for Tucker Carlson, the host of Fox’s highest-rated program.
“It is a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions,” the two wrote in The Dispatch. “If a person with such a platform shares such misinformation loud enough and long enough, there are Americans who will believe—and act upon—it.”
From here, Hayes and Goldberg will presumably continue writing for The Dispatch, their brainchild.
Goldberg may also continue working for the liberal Los Angeles Times. In the past, he has contributed to CNN and MSNBC. He has remained silent on his future plans for a relationship with those networks.
“We started The Dispatch two years ago ‘to do right as we see it, by providing engaged citizens fact-based reporting and commentary on politics, policy and culture—informed by conservative principles,'” the two wrote.
“With the release of [Tucker Carlson’s] Patriot Purge, we felt we could no longer ‘do right as we see it’ and remain at Fox News. So we resigned.”
Hayes and Goldberg started The Dispatch after the decline of The Weekly Standard, a magazine edited by anti-Trump Republicans like Bill Kristol. Hayes himself worked for the defunct magazine.
The pair now write The Dispatch for Substack, a publishing company.
Substack has been praised for allowing big-name pundits — like Goldberg — to earn their full market value, but it has also been criticized as providing too few avenues to fund investigative reporting.
A Substack staffer wrote in March, “We pay a writer an upfront sum to cover their first year on the platform. The idea is that the payment can be more attractive to a writer than a salary, so they don’t have to stay in a job (or take one) that’s less interesting to them than being independent.”
Last year, Hayes told The New York Times that The Dispatch had raked in almost $2 million in one year, despite employing fewer than 20 people.
Hayes and Golberg concluded, “We remain grateful for the opportunities we’ve had at Fox and we continue to admire many of the hard-working journalists who work there. This is our last recourse. We do not regret our decision, even if we find it regrettably necessary.”
Tucker Carlson himself told the NYT, “Our viewers will be grateful.”
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