Fox News’ firing of Bob Beckel last week was hardly a crushing loss for liberalism in the public discourse. As co-host of The Five from 2011 to 2015, and again this year, the Democratic commentator routinely disgraced the progressive cause. He once proudly declared, “I’m an Islamophobe.” He repeatedly made misogynistic comments and dropped racial slurs on air. Just earlier this month, he complained that Democrats talk too much about being “the party of labor, women, minorities, you know, LBGT, whatever,” when they should be focused on “working people.” Fox says it terminated Beckel “for making an insensitive remark to an African-American employee,” but any network that valued progressive ideas would have permanently cut ties with him long ago.

Of course, Fox News has never valued such ideas. The network has a long tradition of bringing aboard liberals who are either poorly equipped for televised combat with conservatives, or are willing, as Beckel was, to validate right-wing narratives. While he’d toe the Democratic line on health care and push back on climate change denial, his anti-Muslim rantings and other offensive and antiquated views kept conservatives comfortable. “That’s the challenge of being the Fox News liberal,” said Marc Lamont Hill, a progressive contributor to Fox in the early Obama years. “You have to concede something you shouldn’t have to in terms of being seen as reasonable as a long-term presence there.” But as Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple told me, the Beckel model is the ultimate way to advance the Fox News agenda. “For Fox News, you can’t ask for a better liberal than that,” he said.

And yet, the network used to feature better left-of-center voices. Though he was maligned as a milquetoast patsy, Alan Colmes’s run as the original Fox News liberal looks better in retrospect. Kirsten Powers, who left for CNN last year after more than a decade at Fox, held her own in any debate. “She’s a ferocious advocate for her points of view,” Wemple said. “I do think she was tremendously effective in rebutting Bill O’Reilly.” He called Hill, another frequent O’Reilly sparring partner, “one of the great TV polemicists of all time.” Sally Kohn, a contributor from 2012-2013, brought a remarkably left-wing perspective that often went viral online. “I felt like I was making a difference,” Kohn told me.

Today, Fox News is facing an existential crisis. Founder and CEO Roger Ailes was forced out amid allegations of serial sexual harassment, as was O’Reilly, Fox’s biggest star. (Ailes has since died.) Bill Shine, a Fox executive close to Ailes, was elbowed out, too. Megyn Kelly left for NBC News, Greta Van Susteren for MSNBC. The network that dominated cable-news ratings for years recently fell to third place, behind CNN and MSNBC. Amid this wreckage, Fox News must figure out how to carry on without the (white) men who built it, how to compete with increasingly prominent right-wing outlets like Breitbart and InfoWars, and how to position itself with regard to President Donald Trump.

One thing’s sure, though: liberalism has never been more poorly represented on the network. “It’s virtually unwatchable,” Hill told me. The notion of a Fox News liberal, he added, is “almost an oxymoron at this point.” This may seem like a lesser concern right now, given the aforementioned turmoil, but the decline of liberal opinion on Fox News and the network’s broader struggles go hand in hand.