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A Note to Our Readers From Steve and Jonah
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A Note to Our Readers From Steve and Jonah

Dear Dispatch reader, Jonah and I strongly prefer covering and analyzing current events to being ...

Dear Dispatch reader,

Jonah and I strongly prefer covering and analyzing current events to being the news. But some developments over the past few weeks mean that we’ll be the focus of some reporting and attention and we wanted you to hear it from us first. 

As you may know, we’ve been Fox News contributors for a long time. For most of that time, we enjoyed ourselves and believed we were contributing to a good cause. Whether you call it liberal media bias or simply a form of groupthink around certain narratives, having a news network that brought different assumptions and asked different questions—while still providing real reporting and insightful conservative analysis and opinion—was good for the country and journalism.

But over the past few years, that’s changed. And the tension has grown between what we are building at The Dispatch—a fact-driven, center-right media company—and what’s come to dominate the network, particularly in primetime. 

In late October, Tucker Carlson aired a promotion for a series he produced for Fox Nation, Fox’s subscription streaming service, called Patriot Purge. It’s a revisionist history of January 6, one in which those who entered the Capitol are largely portrayed as misunderstood patriots and many of those responsible for the violence are government officials or agents provocateurs acting on their behalf. Among the main protagonists of the series are the organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rallies and a racist fired from the Trump White House for his associations with white nationalists. The message of the series? The U.S. government is coming after patriots as part of a “War on Terror 2.0,” using the same tools and tactics used to fight al-Qaeda.

This isn’t true, and it’s dangerous to pretend it is. And for us, it was way too far. We resigned after watching the series in its entirety and asked Fox to release us from the rest of our contracts. Shortly after making this request, we began to get inquiries from journalists about our decision. We’re not looking to occupy the permanent anti-Fox seats at CNN or MSNBC, but we thought it worth discussing our decision—and the factors that led to it—with a couple of journalists who cover the media. The first of those stories appears tonight in the New York Times. You can find it, here—and our Dispatch post about the decision, here

We’re disappointed it came to this. We’ve enjoyed great relationships with many of the news professionals at Fox and we know there is still a sizable audience that tunes into Fox for reported news. But after watching the series, what had long been a difficult decision quickly became an obvious one.

Thanks again for being a Dispatch reader. 

Have a great Thanksgiving,

Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg

Steve Hayes is CEO and editor of The Dispatch, based in Annapolis, Maryland. Prior to co-founding the company in 2019, he worked at The Weekly Standard for 18 years, covering Washington, politics, and national security. Steve is the author of two New York Times bestsellers. He also worked as a contributor at CNN and Fox News, and currently serves as a political analyst at NBC News. When Steve is not focused on The Dispatch, he’s probably traveling with his family, grilling, or riding his mountain bike.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Dispatch, based in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, enormous lizards roamed the Earth. More immediately prior to that, Jonah spent two decades at National Review, where he was a senior editor, among other things. He is also a bestselling author, longtime columnist for the Los Angeles Times, commentator for CNN, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. When he is not writing the G-File or hosting The Remnant podcast, he finds real joy in family time, attending to his dogs and cat, and blaming Steve Hayes for various things.

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