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A former Fox News contributor who left the network in protest of their coverage of the Capitol attack has accused the channel's hosts of being dishonest in their support of Donald Trump.
In a lengthy opinion piece for The Dispatch, Jonah Goldberg hit out at Fox News for being "complicit in so many lies," including continuing to praise the former president post-election and after the January 6 insurrection.
Goldberg, who left the network after it broadcast Tucker Carlson's three-part series Patriot Purge, which was filled with falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the Capitol attack, accused those at Fox of supporting Trump on air while criticizing him in private.
"I know that a huge share of the people you saw on TV praising Trump were being dishonest," Goldberg wrote. "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."
Goldberg penned the piece days after days after the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol attack revealed that Fox News personalities Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade all messaged Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows during the riot, citing concerns about the violence and attempting to get the president to call for it to end.
The texts, revealed by Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, are in direct contradiction to how many Fox News hosts later reported on the January 6 riot, including downplaying the seriousness of it, denying that Trump helped incite the attack, or spreading conspiracy theories that the violence was actually committed by far-left antifa protesters.
In his article, Goldberg singled out Ingraham for scrutiny over her coverage of the Capitol attack.
Ingraham was found to have texted Meadows that Trump "needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy" during the riot.
Goldberg noted that Ingraham did denounce the violence on January 6 on her show later that evening, she did so while implying "all sorts of fan service nonsense" about antifa provoking the violence" and that the mob of Trump supporters were "right to be angry" about the allegedly rigged election.
He added that Ingraham's text to Meadows shows that she believed the mob storming the building on January 6 "was Trump's to command" but he chose not to.
"That truth is what she left out that night—and, as far as I can tell, every night since," Goldberg wrote.
"In other words, 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."
Elsewhere, Goldberg also said Fox News adopted a "whataboutism" defense so as not to criticize the former president as a reason to leave the "prime time Trumpism" network.
Goldberg used examples such as bringing up Bill Clinton's sexual assault allegations when the claims against Trump emerged, or Hannity discussing how the media focuses on the Capitol riot over the disorder at Black Lives Matter protests last summer.
"Eventually, I felt like a cog in the whataboutist machinery," Goldberg said.
"And as a conservative who passionately believes the conspiracy-mongering, demagogic, populist, personality cult nonsense that defines so much of prime time Trumpism is not conservatism rightly understood, or even conservative in any meaningful sense, I felt I couldn't associate myself with it."
Fox News has been contacted for comment.
About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, and Florida ... Read more