Today, her first full post-Fox News day, Greta Van Susteren is at Arlington National Cemetery to pay respects to Elaine Harmon, a World War II pilot who, after a lengthy fight culminating in an act of Congress, will be laid to rest there today.
As she arrived, she realized how closely people have been following the twists and turns of the Fox News news.
Just got asked by a guard at Arlington Cemetery, do get you part of that 20m settlement? 🙂
Advertisement— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) September 7, 2016
After filing a sexual harassment suit against former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes in July, Van Susteren’s former colleague Gretchen Carlson reached a settlement Tuesday with 21st Century Fox in which she will be paid $20 million and an apology: “We sincerely regret and apologize for the fact that Gretchen was not treated with the respect and dignity that she and all of our colleagues deserve,” the company said in a statement. Not long after that news broke, Fox announced Van Susteren was departing after 14 years with the network.
CNN and the New York Times have more of the backstory of Greta’s abrupt exit.
A courier arrived at Van Susteren’s Washington, D.C. home at 9 a.m. Tuesday, hand-delivering two letters that said that Van Susteren ‘was being taken off the air’ immediately, according to her husband, John Coale, who is a high-profile Washington lawyer. Van Susteren was already planning to leave, but she thought she would be hosting her 7 p.m. program ‘On the Record’ for a few more weeks. Yanking her off the air without a chance to say goodbye was ‘a bit immature,’ Coale remarked.
It was so abrupt that a large-scale poster of Ms. Van Susteren, who routinely beat the cable competition in her 7 p.m. time slot, was still displayed outside Fox’s Manhattan building when the announcement went out. (The poster was removed later on Tuesday.) Inside the channel’s Washington bureau, newspapers sat untouched outside Ms. Van Susteren’s still-full office.
Brit Hume, who retired from anchoring a daily Fox News show 8 years ago, will host On the Record through the election. “This stuff exhausts me as much as it excites me,” he told reporters during a send-off lunch in his honor, just a few weeks before the 2008 election.