Eric Bolling is out at Fox News over sex pictures, while Charles Payne returns to Fox Business
September 9, 2017 by admin
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Sexual harassment investigations at Fox News had on-air hosts coming and going on Friday.
The network has cut loose Eric Bolling, who was suspended on Aug. 5, and has also canceled his daily program “Fox News Specialists.”
The law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton Garrison, investigated allegations that Bolling used his cellphone to send unsolicited photos of male genitalia to current and former female colleagues at the network. The firm has been handling harassment claims at the 21st Century Fox unit.
“Fox News Channel is canceling the ‘Specialists,’ and Eric Bolling and Fox have agreed to part ways amicably,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement. “We thank Eric for his 10 years of service to our loyal viewers and wish him the best of luck.”
Earlier Friday, Fox News confirmed that Fox Business host Charles Payne is returning to his job at the network after he was cleared in an internal investigation of sexual harassment claims lodged by a female political analyst who was a frequent guest on his program.
A Fox News representative confirmed that the company’s review of the allegations against Payne has been completed and that he would return to his nightly program “Making Money” on Friday night.
Bolling’s program, “Fox News Specialists” was to have its final airing Friday. His co-hosts, Kat Timpf and Eboni Williams, will remain with Fox News as contributors. An hourlong newscast will fill the 5 p.m. Eastern hour starting Monday.
The allegations against Bolling were among the many to hit 21st Century Fox, which has been plagued by sexual harassment allegations since former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson filed suit last year against the network’s former chief executive, Roger Ailes. Since then, other women have come forward with allegations against Ailes, who died in May, and other significant figures at the company.
The network’s star anchor, Bill O’Reilly, was pushed out in April after reports that he and Fox had paid out millions of dollars to settle harassment claims going back to 2004.
Payne has been off the air since July 6 when he was suspended hours after the Los Angeles Times first reported that he was being investigated over allegations of sexual misconduct.
No other details about the results of either investigation were available, but Payne’s return seems to indicate he was cleared, while Bolling was not.
No comment has been given by the attorneys for the hosts.
Bolling, 54 was a rising star at Fox News. After a career as a commodities trader, he became a commentator at CNBC. He joined Fox Business Network in 2007 and eventually became part of the late afternoon roundtable show “The Five” on Fox News Channel.
After O’Reilly’s departure, “The Five” moved to prime time, but Bolling stayed in the late afternoon slot to head up “Fox News Specialists.” He signed a new multi-year contract earlier this year.
Bolling was suspended after a report from the web site HuffPost said the host was sending lewd photos from his cellphone to former and current female colleagues at the network. Bolling’s lawyer issued a denial and the host threatened to sue the reporter who broke the story, but no suit has been filed.
Payne was investigated on charges from a female political commentator who said she was allegedly coerced into a sexual relationship with him in return for guest appearances on the network.
Payne acknowledged that he was in a three-year “romantic relationship” with the woman. But he has called the claims of harassment “an ugly lie.”
The woman was never an employee of Fox News but appeared as a guest on numerous Fox News and Fox Business Network programs with the hope of becoming a paid contributor.
She has told her lawyer, who prepared a legal complaint against Fox News and Payne, that she stayed in the relationship with the host because she believed he would help her chances of landing a paying position at the network. She alleged that her opportunities diminished after the relationship ended in 2015 when Payne’s wife learned of their involvement.
Payne, who joined Fox Business in 2006 as a contributor, signed a new multiyear contract in June.
stephen.battaglio@latimes.com
Twitter: @SteveBattaglio
UPDATES:
1:40 p.m.:This article was updated with additional details about Bolling’s termination.
This article was originally published at 9:45 a.m.
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Is Donald Trump as Sane as Kim Jong Un?
September 8, 2017 by admin
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If we go back in time, we’ll see that much of today’s crisis is the fruit of yesterday’s dumb feelings. When Bill Clinton turned over the White House to George W. Bush, North Korea was nearly contained. A deal had been reached to provide North Korea with heavy fuel oil and light-water reactors in exchange for shutting down their plutonium reactor. Unfortunately, this disgusted Washington’s hawks, and they did their best to undermine it. Only an amoral egghead, went the sentiment, would stoop to cut a deal with a malevolent tyrant. Once Bush took office, the heart got to point the way. “We don’t negotiate with evil,” explained Vice President Dick Cheney. “We defeat it.”
Well, that worked out well. Going with gut revulsion toward North Korea’s tyranny regime led Pyongyang to tear up the deal and get back to its bomb-making ways. By the time Bush handed off the problem, North Korea was well on the way to being untouchable.
Then came Barack Obama, who looked at all his options. Failure might have been an unavoidable result, but what made it inevitable, at least after 2011, was yet another moment when sentiment pushed reason out of the car and grabbed the wheel. That was when Libyans started to protest the tyranny of their leader, Muammar Qaddafi, in February 2011. The protesters had grounds for complaint, especially since Qaddafi’s response was to promise to kill them all. But did it mean the United States should intervene?
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Yes, came the consensus reply. Decent people couldn’t stand by while mass killing unfolded. Reluctance to use force, of the sort Obama was showing, was “a disgrace,” wrote Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic. Familiar names like Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen and Council of Foreign Relations fellow Max Boot were among the many signatories to a letter urging Obama to take action “for the sake of our security as well as America’s credibility.” So did Samantha Power and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. So did former Clinton employee and Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, with a New York Times op-ed headlined “Fiddling While Libya Burns.” This wasn’t her title, but it summed up the zeitgeist of the moment. Eventually, Obama relented and took out Qaddafi by force.
Rare in that stretch were the voices counseling nonintervention, and even fewer were those warning of the effect on nuclear proliferation. They included American Conservative blogger Daniel Larison, conservative provocateur Mark Steyn, and C.I.A. veteran Paul Pillar, who warned about the message sent when we whacked “someone who gave up not only terrorism but also his unconventional weapons programs in return for normal relations.” Arms expert Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey was among an even rarer group who warned that North Korea was watching.
As it turned out, the dissenters were right. Iran’s leaders took notice, and hard-liners redoubled their efforts to scuttle negotiations over the country’s nuclear program, warning that they could otherwise share Qaddafi’s fate. Similarly, Pyongyang’s news agency laid out its analysis: that the nuclear deal with Qaddafi had been a trap which, using “such sweet words as ‘guarantee of security’ and ‘improvement of relations,’” had caused Libya’s regime to disarm and “then swallowed it up by force.” To which the official U.S. response was something like, “Well, yeah, but . . . we didn’t destroy Qaddafi until he displeased us, and that was, like, eight years later.”
To be fair, sentiments here were running strong. If I recall my own thoughts correctly, for instance, I considered the effects of our actions on nuclear proliferation but still, I confess, felt only mildly opposed to the intervention. That was because thoughts about incentives or broken deals or sovereignty seemed legalistic and hypothetical, while the threat of bloody suppression in Libya seemed immediate and visceral. But that’s precisely the problem. After all, what’s theoretical today becomes visceral tomorrow. Qaddafi’s oppression bothered us, but a nuclear exchange with North Korea will bother us even more.