In case you haven’t had enough weird in your life lately, here’s a “unique” video from former Fox News Washington correspondent Doug McKelway talking about his retirement from the TV news business.
The Washington Post noted very few people outside of Fox News walls were aware of McKelway’s retirement … with the exception of this video released on his Facebook profile page on Sept. 11.
In the video, captioned, “I survived 40 years in TV news. And lived to tell about it! RETIREMENT DAY!”,McKelway is wearing a “Sex, Drugs, and Flatt & Scraggs” T-shirt while quoting Hunter S. Thompson, and claiming that you only get hired in the media industry in part for your looks, and revealing that the late, disgraced Fox News CEO Roger Ailes had told him he was not as attractive as former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.
“My last day, after forty years in TV news. I just retired. I wanted to thank four or five people as I say goodbye, I want to thank Bryan Boughton, the bureau chief, and Bill Sammon, the managing editor of the Washington bureau. Two real gentlemen in an industry where Hunter S. Thompson said it was a shallow money trench where good men die like dogs. Two real gentlemen.
McKelway also thanked former Special Report producer Jim Eldridge and former Fox News vp of news Michael Clemente, before praising Ailes.
“And I also want to thank Roger Ailes. Yes, I’m going to repeat that, I want to thank Roger Ailes. Much maligned, generally through errors of omission in reporting by people who had it out for him, but I’m going to tell you a story about Roger Ailes.
“When I was hired here, I had to meet with him. No one got hired here on air without meeting with Roger Ailes, so that came, he wanted to meet with me, I went to his office, he looked at me for about five seconds as I walked in, and then said this, it’s a direct quote: ‘Well you’re a good-looking guy, but you’re no Megyn Kelly.’ It was compliment and criticism in one short sentence. Carrot and stick in one short sentence.”
The best thing you can say about Roger Ailes is that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and everybody at cable news tried to imitate him, but no one could do it as well as he could …”
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