Geraldo Rivera Says ‘Embarrassment’ of Fox News’ $787.5 Million Settlement ‘Really Woke Them Up’
Geraldo Rivera opened up to fellow former Fox News host Alisyn Camerota about his departure from the network on CNN, Tuesday, and claimed the “embarrassment” that Fox News suffered from its $787.5 million Dominion settlement “really woke them up.”
During an appearance on CNN Tonight, just a few weeks after his Fox News exit, Rivera told Camerota, “I feel liberated. I feel free, free at last,” and claimed that he had been muzzled at the network.
“We were muzzled. Corporate discipline muzzles people,” he said. “They denied me permission to go on many shows over the course of my long career there. They have a very rigid, very controlled kind of discipline.”
Asked by Camerota what Fox News was afraid of, Rivera said, “Well, my flamboyance and, you know, saying things like I said about former President Trump. You know, that he knifed the Constitution in the back. When you have that as your attitude, that’s your, you know, position, and you’re in a conservative milieu, you know it’s pretty noxious to folks who believe a certain way.”
Rivera described Fox News as “a very rigid, very controlled atmosphere where everyone answers to management and management doesn’t allow freewheeling,” and claimed he was suspended from The Five on three separate occasions in the timespan of just a few months.
Rivera claimed he was suspended at one point for “complaining about Tucker Carlson, when he had the outlandish theory that January 6 was staged, it was a government operative, the whole thing was a theatrical performance.”
“It was total bullshit and I said it,” he said. “I said it in those words, it was published, and I get suspended right there.”
After Camerota asked Rivera whether Fox News’ whopping $787.5 million settlement to Dominion would “change how they do business” and “their relationship with facts,” Rivera said, “They really understood that what they did was really so far off the norm that they had to apologize in a way that only corporations apologize, with money.”
He continued:
I just think that the embarrassment from what happened on their January 6, post-January 6 coverage, the embarrassment that they suffered as a corporation will and already has affected the way they presented. Yes, they’re still heavily opinionated in the evenings, that is true, but I think they would never, I would hope, now say something just to get an audience. I don’t think it’s that raw, their ambition, anymore now that they’ve been, you know, really scolded.
Rivera said, “I think the penalty, the scolding that they got from the public really woke them up,” before concluded that while “conservatives deserve their own scene, their own network,” they “just have to be more, as you say, fact based. They have to be more professional. They have to be less partisan.”
Watch above via CNN.
