Geraldo Rivera had some interesting things to say about Fox News on The View yesterday but he and some of the hosts did a bit of rewriting of history.
Rivera obviously has mixed feelings about Fox
Rivera has offered conflicting accounts of whether he quit or was fired from The Five. Regardless, he was clearly pushed out. On The View he said he was fired from The Five and was told there are “plenty of other things you can do” at Fox, given that he had a year and a half left on his contract. “I said, ‘Well, stop it. If you fire me from the number one show, then I’m going to quit.”
He then talked glowingly about how Fox was “so kind” to him after that. Sure they were. He quit graciously without making a huge stink. Nobody asked whether he was paid the rest of his contract. Given how glowingly Rivera talked about Fox, we’ll assume he got paid at least part of it.
Still, Rivera said sometimes "bitterness seeps in."
“My ideology doesn’t fit Fox, so they always kind of squeezed me in,” Rivera said. The fact is, when they needed a sort-of liberal to attack Blacks, Geraldo was their guy.
Rivera did not say that Greg Gutfeld pushed him out. But it’s pretty obvious that’s what happened. Rivera also made it clear that Fox management sided with Gutfeld every time there was an issue.
“I thought that it was very unfair that I wasn’t judged objectively in our disputes,” Rivera said about the still unnamed cohost we all know was Gutfeld. “But, rather, he was always favored and I was the one. I was suspended three times. I had two, three appearances scheduled weekly, then bi-weekly then monthly, then they kind of disappeared. They were cancelled in the last day, right before I was supposed to go on. So, I was really ticked off.”
The View hosts jumped on the fact that Rivera had said his dispute was with a “he.” “So, it’s not Jeanine?” Joy Behar said, meaning Pirro.
“I love Jeanine,” Rivera said. “I discovered Jeanine in the 1990s. She was a district attorney and I put her on TV during the [O.J.] Simpson case.”
Well, that’s nice. And Pirro may be a great friend – she divorced her cheating, criminal, reportedly mobbed-up husband but successfully lobbied Donald Trump to pardon him just before leaving office – but she’s not good for democracy. Media Matters correctly describes her as a “notorious font of misinformation and bigotry.” (Remember her bigoted attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar?)
Even worse, Pirro aired two monologues filled with election lies, Media Matters also notes, “all while her own executive producer denigrated her privately as a ‘reckless maniac’ who “should never be on live television.” Then she got promoted to Fox’s highest-rated show, The Five.
So while Rivera went on to denounce the election denying, broadly, at Fox and by Trump, he seemed 100% willing to excuse it from his pals.
Perhaps his comments about his former pal, Donald Trump, summed up Geraldo’s feelings: “I have vowed to dedicate whatever energy I have left in the profession to ensure that he is not re-elected president, ever. I think what he did on – in the days and weeks leading up to January 6th and on January 6th was so unforgiveable, he stabbed the Constitution in the back,” Rivera said. “Even though I still have affection for him and remember the good times.”
Rivera and some of The View hosts pretended Trump changed since he was merely ‘a New York character’
But The View hosts enabled and were part of the crap.
"Everyone knows I was close to Donald Trump for decades," Rivera said. "You can boo or cheer. We came up together in New York, from the 1970s."
Behar said she had gone to Trump's wedding and claimed Trump was “different” back then. Spoiler alert: he wasn’t.
Apparently, Behar was referring to Trump's second wedding, in 1993, when he married Marla Maples.
In 1989, Trump spent $85,000 for full-page ads in four New York City newspapers, calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, young men of color who were, as it turned out, wrongly accused of raping a white female jogger in Central Park. The ads said the city was “ruled by the law of the streets, as roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods, dispensing their own vicious brand of twisted hatred on whomever they encounter." Sound familiar? He insisted the five were guilty even after the city settled with them for $41 million, in 2014.
Trump was recently found to have sexually abused E. Jean Carroll in 1996; The Atlantic, which has a long list of Trump scandals from before he moved into the White House, notes that one woman accused him of sexually abuse or assault in the 1970s and another in the 1990s. Trump and his father were sued by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1973 for housing discrimination at 39 sites around New York, The Atlantic also notes. And there were reported ties to the Mafia.
So, no, Trump hasn’t changed. It’s just that Behar, Rivera and others were OK with what he was then or at least were OK overlooking the parts they may have found distasteful. As a former New Yorker, I am proud to say I never was and I never did. Just think what may have been avoided if so many New Yorkers had not been dazzled by his BS back then.
The gang also praised Bret Baier’s journalism, despite damaging revelations to the contrary
Rivera claimed, without challenge, that Bret Baier is a “wonderful” journalist. Cohost Sunny Hostin agreed, “He’s good.”
FACT CHECK: “Wonderful journalist” Baier was complicit in the election lying at Fox. From my June 20, 2023 post:
Baier was disgraced in various revelations [from the Dominion defamation case] about his willingness to put MAGA lies about the facts in public, even as he acknowledged the truth privately: He was caught strategizing with Tucker Carlson on how to “slow walk” calling 2020 election results so that other networks would go first and give Fox cover; Even worse, he complained about how “really uncomfortable” it was to keep defending Fox’s early Arizona call and urged the president of the company to reverse it. Baier also whitewashed Trump’s 2021 comments about the “stolen election” in July of that year.
Still, I listened raptly to the entire interview. Rivera said there’s a lot of fear at Fox because there have been a lot of cutbacks since the $787.5 million settlement with Dominion and the $12 million settlement with Abby Grossberg. There’s also the $2.7 billion defamation case pending with Smartmatic and now the defamation suit from Ray Epps.
Also this: “When Osama bin Laden was killed, in 2011, I was blessed to be on the air to announce to the American people, to break the news, that the person who had caused all the suffering to my friends, and, you know, six dads from my kid’s grade school were killed in the towers, the guy that did that to us, the reason I went to Fox, was gone,” Rivera said. “I should have left Fox then, in 2011.”
There were 12 years since then, and more than two years since the 2020 election lies began, followed by January 6, 2021. Why didn’t Rivera quit until now? I wish someone had asked.
You can watch the whole interview below, from the July 14, 2023 The View.
(Thanks to Brian who highlighted some of the relevant portions of the interview for me in advance)
(Updated 7/15/23 10:16 PM)