Fox News has come under fire after private messages reveal the network’s hosts, executives, and even Chairman Rupert Murdoch did not believe the election denialism espoused by then-President Trump after the 2020 election.
Former Fox News contributor Jonah Goldberg — who now serves as a CNN contributor — appeared on CNN This Morning Wednesday to discuss the situation and claimed the network had become fearful of the audience it helped bolster and was forced into agreeing with Trump’s campaign out of worry its devoted fans would leave the network for Newsmax or OAN.
“What comes across blisteringly clear is that Fox management thought that the competing issues here have nothing really to do with serious journalism and telling the truth,” Goldberg said. “They had to do with holding on to an audience even — even if that cost them integrity and reputation as telling the truth to their audience because they created a monster with their audience that they were then terrified of.”
Goldberg was a contributor on Fox News for 12 years, but left the network after Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation project Patriot Purge claimed the January 6th Insurrection was a “false flag operation”, insinuating the FBI, other national security agencies, and Antifa were the culprits for the altercations at the U.S. Capitol.
Goldberg argued that the Fox News news gathering division remains unscathed from the scandal, claiming Bret Baier “fact-checked this stuff”. CNN This Morning co-host Don Lemon pushed back on that claim, saying the news coverage is often overshadowed at the network by the conservative primetime pundits — Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham — which Goldberg claimed was indicative of the industry as a whole.
“There is a problem across the media landscape — it’s just wildly out of scale at Fox — and the problem is that the opinion side started to set the news agenda,” countered Goldberg. “The issues that got ratings for the opinion people became the issues that the news side largely reported on. And just became this sort of self-defeating process. And then they just got addicted to the ratings and the returns.”
