Geraldon't

 Will the last one out of Faux News please turn out the lights. 

Or, perhaps, go ahead and leave them on in hopes that an electrical fire will somehow ignite and torch the entire enterprise. 

Geraldo Rivera is leaving "the network." It took him twenty-three years to get fed up with the way he was treated, and now he's moving on to greener pastures. I shudder to think at the quantum level of greenness that must exist outside of Fox News, but there you go. 

Word has it, by the way, that Geraldo was being kept around as the token "liberal" voice on the channel. As a registered Republican, Mister Rivera was still allowed to eat in the Fox cafeteria and to have a resereved parking spot every other Thursday. When he wasn't busy taking abuse for his pro-choice, pro-same-sex marriage views, he had at times considered a run for the United States Senate. Fiscally conservative, but still willing to try and shout down the Hannitys and Watters whenever the situation called for it. He got paid two million dollars a year for the privilege. 

Before that, Geraldo was once a crusading lawyer type with clients like Harlem gang members, he took a job in 1970 with ABC News. He was able to keep on crusading there for a number of years until he decided that what everyone really wanted to know was what Al Capone was keeping in his vault. When the answer to that musical question turned out to be nothing, he realized that he was on to something. Sometimes, to quote the film, nothing can be pretty cool hand. 

For eleven years he was one of the chief purveyors of tabloid TV along with hackmeisters like Maury Povich and Morton Downey Jr. You might remember one particular episode of his eponymously titled show in which he sat a group of black and Jewish activists down next to a bunch of Nazi skinheads. If you didn't see it, your imagined vision of the chaos will do. 

It was this kind of forward thinking journalism that landed Geraldo a spot on Fox News. As a war correspondent, hanging around in Afghanistan making a name for himself by making the impossible job of American soldiers there even more difficult. When that action proved too hot, he decided to come back to the U.S. to make pointed comments like suggesting that Trayvon Martin would never have been shot and killed if he hadn't been wearing a hoodie. It was that kind of hard-hitting reporting that kept him around for Rupert Murdoch to throw money at. 

But now, eighty years young, Geraldo Rivera is preparing for life away from the umbilical Fox. Fox, in turn, will have to look high and low for a "liberal" shill to fill in the vacuum of right wing rhetoric. Don't count Geraldo out. He'll probably show up as a guest on Tucker's Twitter Playhouse soon enough.