After almost a decade on air, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes are resigning from Fox News. Find out why these commentators and other staff members have left the news network.
According to their statement on Sunday, 21 November 2021, they found it “regrettably necessary” to resign from the news network. Their reason for their departure from the network is in protest of prime-time host Tucker Carlson.
The duo said Carlson’s bizarre three-part documentary on the Capitol riots, Patriot Purge, which was shared on Fox’s subscription streaming service, Fox Nation, as well as being promoted by the network, was publicizing a dangerous and distorted narrative.
They added that it encouraged the debunked conspiracy theory that the FBI incited the deadly insurrection. And that the documentary was “riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions.”
Because of this, they explained that they “felt [they] could no longer ‘do right as [they] see it and remain at Fox News,” following the release of Patriot Purge.
Stephen Hayes is a 51-year-old American journalist and author from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, who graduated from DePauw University before studying at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
He has a career as a political reporter for multiple US news outlets while lending himself as a commentator on CNN, The McLaughlin Group, MSNBC, CNSBC, and C-SPAN. Hayes was also an early critic of Donald Trump and admitted in a joint statement with Goldberg that their loyalty to Fox has tested them many times over the past few years.
Jonah Goldberg, a close associate with Stephen Hayes, is an American columnist, author, political analyst, and commentator. He became the co-editor of the Goucher College school newspaper for two years while he was majoring in political science at the school.
After interning for a string of news organizations, the 52-year-old created a stellar career in media. Besides these Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, other staff members have left the Fox News network, and we look at the reasons in the next part.
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1. Roger Ailes
Roger Ailes was one of the pioneer staff members of Fox News who served at the helm of the news network from its debut in 1996. He has the credits of building the channel into the media empire it is today and grew to be the CEO of the network.
However, in July 2016, he resigned. Unlike Jonah Goldberg, Ailes resigned because he was accused of s_xual harassment by Gretchen Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and several other women.
He denied the charges, some of which dated back to at least the early 1990s, but died a year later. His death was ruled accidental after falling and hitting his head in his Palm Beach, Florida, home at age 77.
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2. Gretchen Carlson
Journalist Gretchen Carlson left the news network in June 2013, but it is unconfirmed if she voluntarily resigned or was forced to — many people favor the latter.
The journalist had joined Fox News in 2005 as a co-host for its morning show Fox & Friends and left the program in 2013 before her contract expired on June 23, 2016.
After she left, she started her news network called The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson. In a lawsuit filed barely two weeks after her departure from the company, she also alleged that they fired her in retaliation for her refusal to sleep with former chairman Roger Ailes.
The suit eventually led to his resignation, and Carlson reportedly received $20 million in a settlement with 21st Century Fox (which came with a non-disclosure agreement). In 2019, she requested to be let out of the agreement and published a book in 2020 about how to stop s_xual harassment in the workplace. You can buy it on Amazon here: https://bit.ly/Gretchen-Carlson-Book.
3. Megyn Kelly
Megyn Kelly was a former talk show host on Fox News who contributed to several of the company’s program segments. She also later anchored her own show during her 13-year tenure at the media house.
However, the sharp questions she threw at Donald Trump during his GOP presidential debate in 2015 saw her become nationally famous. The former US President’s reaction of repeatedly attacking Kelly also made the whole situation more newsworthy. To make peace between the two, Fox had Kelly host the first-of-its-kind one-hour prime-time special that aired in May 2016, where she interviewed Trump. Yet, she did not back down from her stance and this allegedly resulted in some within her company criticizing her as well.
In January 2017, Kelly left Fox News for NBC News, where she got her own show. However, her departure came after she also mentioned being a subject of harassment from the aforementioned Roger Ailes. At NBC, she became the host of a new daytime program called Megyn Kelly Today.
4. Ed Henry
Ed Henry’s departure from Fox News is quite similar to Roger Ailes’. On 1 July 2020, the news network announced they had fired him because of allegations of s_xual misconduct from one female staff member and a guest of the network.
One of the accusers, a former producer Jennifer Eckhart, sued the news network, accusing Henry of r_ping her and asking her to be his “s_x slave” According to the suit, Henry “psychologically manipulated and coerced” her into a s_xual relationship beginning in 2014, when she was 24 years old.
Mr Henry not only leveraged this imbalance of power for control over his victim, Ms Eckhart, but asked her to be his ‘s_x slave’ and his ‘little w—-,’ and threatened punishment and retaliation if Ms Eckhart did not comply with his s_xual demands,” part of the lawsuit read.
The other accuser, Cathy Areu, who was once a guest on the network, alleged Henry s_xually harassed her, along with Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Howard Kurtz, and Gianno Caldwell. Ed Henry denied the allegations against him.
5. Eric Bolling
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