Fox News mainstay Geraldo Rivera has parted ways with the network as staffing shake-ups at the conservative institution continue.
Rivera first shared word of his departure from the channel on Thursday, posting a video on Twitter showing him on a boat off the coast of Long Island while saying that he had been dismissed from a panel show which Fox airs weekdays at 5pm ET.
“I’ve been fired from The Five, and as a result of that I quit Fox,” Rivera said in the video.
When asked for comment on Rivera’s remarks, a Fox spokesperson provided a statement which said that the network had “reached an amicable conclusion with Geraldo over the past few weeks”. The statement, written on Thursday, added that Rivera’s appearance on the Friday morning edition of the Fox & Friends show would be his last appearance on the channel. Rivera notably joined the show a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
Rivera, 79, was magnanimous when he appeared on Fox & Friends for his farewell segment on Friday, saying: “I’m deeply touched – I’m honored.
“I love Fox, I love the people at Fox, I always will,” Rivera said. “I’ll never let anyone separate us, but I am beyond grateful for this. This is so deeply affecting. I love you for it – thank you.”
Fox has not said that Rivera’s departure was at all related to the $787.5m settlement that the Rupert Murdoch-owned channel reached with Dominion Voting Systems in April to end a defamation suit over the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud when he lost his 2020 presidential re-election campaign. But it is among a handful of changes at the network since the settlement was announced.
The most notable of those was the firing of host Tucker Carlson within days of the settlement. Fox has maintained that Carlson’s dismissal was unrelated to the settlement, and it has replaced him with Jesse Watters. The network’s ex-star has not commented.
Meanwhile, Carlson’s former managing editor Alexander McCaskill resigned in mid-June after a banner headline which he was thought to be behind described Joe Biden as a “wannabe dictator” during a broadcast.
The banner – or chyron – also said that the president had “his political rival arrested”, referring to a federal indictment filed against Trump which charged him with improperly storing government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
McCaskill had also been accused of having “habitually belittled female employees” – among other things – in a lawsuit brought by the ex-Fox talent booker Abby Grossberg which accused the channel, its owners, and its workers, including Carlson, of fostering an abusive workplace environment.
Rivera embarked on his career in broadcast journalism in 1970. He hosted a daytime talkshow for 11 years beginning in 1987. And, among other gigs, he was a CNBC news host from 1994 to 2001 before joining Fox, where he worked as a war correspondent, weekend anchor and host of the Cops: All Access series.
Generally known to have a flair for controversy and self-promotion, Rivera stood out in recent years for his outspoken criticism of Israel over its attacks on Gaza and other Palestinian targets. With his participation, The Five would often outperform Fox’s other prime-time shows in terms of ratings.
In some quarters, one of the most memorable episodes of Rivera’s run at Fox saw the US military boot him out of Iraq in 2003 for broadcasting details about American troop movements there.
Two years before that, in an on-air flub he blamed on “the fog of war”, he claimed to have been at the scene when three American military members had been slain by friendly fire in Afghanistan before the Baltimore Sun later established that he had been more than 300 miles away.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
