FOX NEWS DROPS BOB BECKEL:
Fox News has officially dropped “The Five” co-host Bob Beckel from the network, saying the show could no longer be held “hostage” to his personal issues.
“We tried to work with Bob for months, but we couldn’t hold The Five hostage to one man’s personal issues,” Bill Shine, executive vice president of programming, said in a statement. “He took tremendous advantage of our generosity, empathy and goodwill and we simply came to the end of the road with him.”
Shine said Fox News personalities Juan Williams and Geraldo Rivera will be “among those rotating on the show for the near future.”
Beckel, who joined the network in 2000, had entered rehab therapy for his addiction to prescription pain medication in April. His last appearance on the network was Feb. 16, more than four months ago.
According to Zev Chafets 2013 biography, Roger Ailes: Off Camera, Beckel was still with CNN in 2000:
In 2002, Beckel was caught up in an extortion attempt by a prostitute. He says that he wasn’t involved with her, and he had been part of a police sting. In any case, he gave her a check with his signature on it, a surpassingly naïve thing for a celebrity to do, even as a favor to the cops. The incident made headlines and CNN dropped him. “I went from making $ 750,000 a year to working at the Government Printing Office for thirteen bucks an hour, that’s how screwed I was,” he says.
Ailes saved him with a job offer.
Ailes knew of Beckel since 1984, when Beckel repurposed Wendy’s “Where the Beef” ad as a campaign slogan for Democrat Walter Mondale, and Ailes was a campaign consultant for first Reagan’s reelection, then George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign. “But managing the Democratic catastrophe of 1984 wasn’t really much of a credential,” Chafets noted. “Beckel, who is funny and brash, was a better television performer than a political operator; he was scooped up as a talking head by various shows and caught on as a full-time commentator at CNN.” When Beckel eventually joined Fox, first as a guest-contributor in 2004, he told Chafets:
“You have to go pretty far to the left to be farther than I am,” says Beckel. “I got shit from all my liberal friends. At one point, some of them actually staged an intervention.”
It didn’t snap him out of it. Beckel stayed at Fox, but he continued to be active in the Democratic Party. One night he was sitting in the bar of the Capital Hilton Hotel when two young men, delegates to the Young Democrats convention, came over and began berating him. “Roger Ailes is worse than fucking Hitler,” one of them said.
“I lost it and put them both on the floor,” says Beckel. “I was embarrassed about this. Shit, I did it sober.”
The story got around Washington and made it to New York. Ailes sent Beckel a giant gift basket with a note: “Thank you for being loyal.”
Which helps to explain how the crude, explosive arch-leftist, a recovering alcoholic and cocaine user lasted as long as he did on Fox.
UPDATE: Only one man can replace Beckel: Anthony Weiner is that man — and he wants the gig.