John Gibson’s big story: he’s been cancelled

It hasn’t been a good week for conservative hosts of unwatchable cable talk shows with poor ratings. Earlier this week, MSNBC yanked Tucker Carlson off the air. The next day, Fox News gave up on notorious blowhard John Gibson.

Fox News Channel, tinkering for the first time in eight years with its popular early evening lineup, is replacing its 5 p.m. news broadcast, “The Big Story,” with an election-theme program for the foreseeable future. The network confirmed this week that “America’s Election HQ,” a program that displaced “The Big Story” temporarily last month, would continue indefinitely. The program’s hosts, Bill Hemmer and Megyn Kelly, also anchor the network’s mid-morning newscast and are seen as rising stars on the channel. The change was first reported by the blog TVNewser.com. John Gibson, the longtime host of “The Big Story,” will continue to have a role on television, the network said, although it appears that his future for now lies mostly on radio. For two years Mr. Gibson, a conservative commentator, has been the host of a three-hour program for Fox News Radio immediately following his television show.

I’d always kind of hoped that Gibson would get fired for something he’d said on the air, but if low ratings did the trick, I suppose the end result is the same.

Of course, with Gibson having lost his show, there’s really one thing left to do: mock him relentlessly for years of foolish, hateful demagoguery.



Stephen Colbert got the ball rolling: “There’s obviously only one big lead story tonight: an influential figure who many of us considered a moral leader has let America down and has been forced to leave his post. Of course I speak of Fox News’ John Gibson.”

Media Matters has done a great job for years of highlighting some of Gibson’s more jaw-dropping remarks, but who could forget his insults of Heath Ledger after his death? Or his concerns about “black devils” who “wanna fight the white devil”? Or the time he said John Edwards “whored his wife’s cancer as a fundraising gimmick”? Or his requests to white people to “make more babies“?

But my personal favorite, as long-time readers may recall, was the time he lost it on the air while debating my friend Rob Boston over the “war on Christmas” — and then called Rob at home to threaten him personally.

So long, John. Your departure has done something I hadn’t thought possible — it’s made Fox News’ lineup just a little less offensive.