If you’re looking to get a job at Fox News, I guess now is as good a time as any, as the network has not only parted ways with Sarah Palin, but has apparently also given a confirmed farewell to longtime analyst Bob Beckel, who has been M.I.A. for the past four months. Unfortunately, though, that farewell appears to be anything but a fond one.
Fox News executive vice president of programming Bill Shine released a statement, according to Politico, that put things in a rather unflattering light, although possibly one that was justly earned.
We tried to work with Bob for months, but we couldn’t hold The Five hostage to one man’s personal issues. He took tremendous advantage of our generosity, empathy and goodwill and we simply came to the end of the road with him.
Dayum, them’s fighting words. Or at least they would be if Beckel’s position was still up in the air. Beckel has been a part of the Fox News team ever since 2000, when he joined as a contributor, and he’d been one of the regular co-hosts of the panel show The Five since July 2011. However, he’d been completely off the airwaves since the middle of February 2015, and it took a few weeks for the network to divulge the reason behind it was that Beckel had undergone back surgery. But the host stayed out longer than normal because he entered rehab for an addiction to painkillers, and that has possibly played a part in why the network is upset with him. Although really, it could be for any number of reasons.
Though he’s been the resident liberal, Beckel has let his occasionally foul mouth and middle fingers get him into trouble over the years. When Julian Assange was first making headlines, the death penalty naysayer Beckel said that the only possible solution was to illegally shoot Assange. He also referred to a group of Jewish Americans as “diamond merchants we don’t know the names of,” said that date rapes on college campuses were uncommon, and also stated that nudists were probably sexually assaulted as children. And in the days following the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, he publically said that students from Islamic countries should get their visas denied.
While no permanent replacements for Beckel have been revealed, Shine stated that Fox News vets Geraldo Rivera and Juan Williams will be “among those rotating on the show for the near future.” So it’s possible that one of them might stay on there for the long run, but we’ll have to see how that works. Are you guys going to miss Bob Beckel?
