Geraldo Rivera, one of the rotating liberal voices on Fox News’s “The Five,” announced he is leaving the program.
His last scheduled appearance on “The Five,” Fox’s most-watched show, will be next week.
“It has been a rocky ride but it has also been an exhilarating adventure that spanned quite a few years,” he told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “I hope it’s not my last adventure.”
Rivera, who will remain a “correspondent at large” for Fox until his contract expires in January of 2025, explained the decision to leave was his. He did note, however, that management at the network “didn’t race after me to say, ‘Geraldo, please come back.’”
Four of the co-hosts on “The Five" are conservative, while Rivera rotated as the dissenting, liberal voice with Jessica Tarlov and Harold Ford Jr.
His time at the network has not always been smooth.
He said he’d been suspended a handful of times, most recently in early May. He had tweeted shortly after Fox fired Tucker Carlson on April 24 that he found Carlson’s theories about the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection to be “bullshit,” leading Gutfeld to respond via tweet, “You’re a class act Geraldo, a real man of the people.” Carlson had downplayed the violence on Jan. 6, calling people who invaded the Capitol “sightseers.”
Rivera and Gutfeld had a handful of particularly contentious exchanges. In late April, Rivera told him “stop pointing at me” when they argued over electric vehicles. He called Gutfeld “an arrogant punk” on the air last year during a fight about abortion. (AP)
Rivera, who will be 80 on July 4, said the show is “too intimate a place and it gets too personal.”
“There has been a growing tension that goes beyond editorial differences and personal annoyances and gripes,” he said. “It’s not worth it to me.”
Morning, it’s official, I’m off @TheFive. My last scheduled show appearances are Thursday and Friday June 29th and 30th. It’s been a great run and I appreciate having had the opportunity. Being odd man out isn’t always easy. For the time being, I’m still Correspondent at Large.
— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) June 21, 2023