Fox News Veteran Doug McKelway Effusively Praises Roger Ailes, Swigs Champagne in Wild Retirement Video

Fox News Washington correspondent Doug McKelway announced his retirement earlier this month, in a wild video shared on his Facebook.

The Washington Post noted on Tuesday that McKelway’s retirement was almost entirely silent with the exception of a strange video released on his personal Facebook page on September 11.

In the video, captioned, “I survived 40 years in TV news. And lived to tell about it! RETIREMENT DAY!” McKelway — wearing a “sex, drugs, and Flatt & Scraggs” t-shirt — quoted Hunter S. Thompson, evoked Faust, claimed you only get hired in the media industry in part for your looks, and revealed that the late, disgraced Fox News CEO Roger Ailes had told him he was not as attractive as Megyn Kelly.

“My last day, after forty years in TV news. I just retired. I wanted to thank four or five people as I say goodbye,” he opened. “I want to thank Bryan Boughton, the bureau chief, and Bill Sammon, the managing editor of the Washington bureau. Two real gentlemen in an industry where Hunter S. Thompson said it was a shallow money trench where good men die like dogs. Two real gentlemen.”

Continuing his list of shoutouts, McKelway then said, “And I wanted to thank Roger Ailes. Yes, I’m going to repeat that, I want to thank Roger Ailes. Much maligned, generally through errors of omission in reporting by people who had it out for him, but I’m going to tell you a story about Roger Ailes.”

“When I was hired here, I had to meet with him. No one got hired here on air without meeting with Roger Ailes, so that came, he wanted to meet with me, I went to his office, he looked at me for about five seconds as I walked in, and then said this, it’s a direct quote: ‘Well you’re a good-looking guy, but you’re no Megyn Kelly,'” McKelway revealed. “It was compliment and criticism in one short sentence. Carrot and stick in one short sentence.”

“The best thing you can say about Roger Ailes is that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and everybody at cable news tried to imitate him, but no one could do it as well as he could,” he continued.

McKelway went on to give younger journalists some advice, saying, “On the subject of age and him saying to me ‘you’re a good-looking guy,’ a point for young people who are entering this business or who are now embogged in it. You make a deal with the devil when you work in television news, you make a Faustian bargain.”

“You may be the smartest person in your class, you might be a Harvard grad, you might be willing to work 24/7, seven days a week, eighteen hours a day. But you got hired in part because of your looks, and that’s the Faustian bargain,” he claimed, adding, “Over time you start to age, you don’t look as well as you did, and there’s another young crop of young, good-looking, talented people who are making their own Faustian bargain.”

“When that day comes for you to leave, a piece of advice: Don’t leave embittered, don’t leave feeling like a victim. Leave with your head held high and with graciousness. With grace,” he concluded, before presenting a bottle of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s favorite champagne to the camera, opening it, and taking a sip.

McKelway previously made headlines in 2019 after leaked emails showed him fighting with Fox News Radio White House correspondent Jon Decker over the president’s infamous Charlottesville comments. Decker demanded that McKelway apologize for defending the president, comparing one of his emails to “something you’d read on a White Supremacist chat room.”