By Leonard Zhukovsky/shutterstock.com
There used to be a time when the news consisted of someone reading news stories in the evening so that people could remain informed about what was happening in their nation’s capital and around the world. Those days are long past, and in an effort to fill the unrelenting 24-hour news cycle, cable networks have hired hundreds of personalities, commentators, and even a few real reporters, to keep the American people on a steady diet of whatever news they feel is prevalent.
However, for the network that has won over them all, the one to whom the record-breaking awards were given, it’s been a tumultuous year, and it’s not getting any better any time soon. As it turns out, the very people who made Fox News the powerhouse that it is, are the self-same people who don’t care for the liberal bias that has crept in. They’re the same people that have turned away in droves, and now it’s upset the balance at the network to the point that even some of their employees are taking their leave.
According to a report in Deadline, longtime conservative commentators Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, have taken their exit from the news station, saying that the “voices of the responses are being drowned out by the irresponsible.” Whether or not their assessment is real and accurate, their letters of resignation certainly are, and they cited conservative-favorite Tucker Carlson as one of the main reasons they’re leaving.
Particularly, the three-part documentary Patriot Purge, which ran on Fox Nation, which they said was “a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions. And its message is clear: The U.S. government is targeting patriotic Americans in the same manner —and with the same tools—that it used to target al Qaeda.”
Deadline characterized the series as “a series of conspiracy theories about the January 6 siege on the Capitol, including that it was a ‘false flag’ operation, that the ‘left is hunting the right,’ and that there is a domestic war on terror orchestrated by the deep state. Hayes and Goldberg wrote that such claims were ‘dangerous,’ and that Carlson’s series was only one in a series of instances of misinformation being advanced by the opinion side of Fox News.”
Another publication reporting on the series, The Dispatch, wrote that “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. In this sense, the release of Patriot Purge wasn’t an isolated incident, it was merely the most egregious example of a longstanding trend. Patriot Purge creates an alternative history of January 6, contradicted not just by common sense, not just by the testimony and on-the-record statements of many participants, but by the reporting of the news division of Fox News itself.”
Now, there is no doubt that it’s infinitely more comfortable for Americans to believe that no such conspiracy are functioning in America today. And there’s a possibility, maybe even a probability, that the mainstream is correct and this is all just one big unhappy accident. However, the fact that the information regarding this conspiracy has been so firmly put down makes those who were on the fence about the issue ready to go to the “dark” side.
And thanks to the loss of credibility that Fox News has suffered, it’s unlikely that a couple of its contributor’s ire will push away those who have seen, what they believe, is the degradation of their freedom, happening before their very eyes.
