Longtime Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera announced Thursday that he is leaving Fox News after working at the station for more than two decades.
Rivera said that he was canned from his co-hosting gig on the network’s political panel talk show “The Five” and made the decision to leave the network as a result.
“I’ve been fired from ‘The Five’ and as a result of that, I quit Fox,” he said in a video taken from his boat and posted to Twitter Thursday.
Rivera, 79, added that he will appear on “Fox and Friends” Friday morning to discuss more details of his departure from the station he has worked at since 2001 — when he was hired as a war correspondent.
“After 23 years tomorrow Fox and Friends could be my last appearance on the network,” he wrote on Twitter. “Thanks for the memories.”
The journalist said he was looking forward to his last couple of times co-hosting “The Five” this week in a video posted Tuesday.
“The program and the network are very important to me, to my life, to my family and so forth,” Rivera said.
Rivera had already revealed that he’d be leaving the show — which has become Fox’s most-watched program — earlier this month. However, he had insisted at the time that the decision was his.
“It has been a rocky ride but it has also been an exhilarating adventure that spanned quite a few years,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press at the time. “I hope it’s not my last adventure.”
“The Five” features regular conservative co-hosts Greg Gutfeld, Jesse Watters, Dana Perino and Jeanine Pirro who are joined by alternating liberal voices — which formerly included Rivera’s.
Rivera turns 80 years old next week and said he was contemplating retirement in an earlier tweet.
