Fox News continued to clean house on Friday, May 19, with the announcement that it has fired "The Five" co-host Bob Beckel for an "insensitive" remake he reportedly made towards an African-American employee. According to the legal team representing the claimant, more heads may roll in the weeks to come.
"As with our other 22 clients, we intend on holding 21st Century Fox accountable for these actions and will be filing multiple other complaints in other matters next week," a statement issued by attorneys Douglas Wigdor and Jeanne Christensen reads. Wigdor and Christensen are the legal faces behind the racial discrimination class action lawsuit that was recently filed by current and former African-American employees of the network, who claim to have refrained from coming forward about what is a culture of racial discrimination at Fox, until now.
Beckel is accused of informing an IT worker who once came to fix his computer, that he was leaving the office because the man was Black. He is said to have then attempted to intimidate the employee after a complaint was filed against him over the incident. It is unclear at this point whether Beckel's firing is altogether a response to the numerous lawsuits weighing on the network, or if it is simply an unwillingness to deal with a headache that Beckel may bring, specifically. Fox has in the past made it clear that Beckel was on a short leash with the company. Such was the case when they let him go (prior to his return) in 2015. "He took tremendous advantage of our generosity, empathy, and goodwill and we simply came to the end of the road with him," Fox News' former executive VP of Programming, Bill Shine, said at the time.
Source: variety.com
