Role Ending Misdemeanor / News and Columns

In an industry that often fixates on bitter politics and violence in the wider world, sometimes the trouble is coming from inside the house, so to speak.

There is a two-week waiting period (after the termination of a role) before an example can be added. This ensures the job loss is accurately reported, actually sticks, and avoids knee-jerk reactions.

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ABC

• Lisa Howard was an actress-turned-news reporter who was ABC's first female correspondent and anchor of the first newscast targeted toward housewives, Lisa Howard and News with the Woman's Touch, while also doing documentaries and interviews with the likes of Fidel Castro (often rumored to have gone beyond professional to personal) in a manner similar to Barbara Walters. However, Howard was fired for violating network policy on public partisanship after she started a group called "Democrats for Keating", made up of liberal Democrats favoring incumbent New York Republican Senator Kenneth Keating, in his unsuccessful 1964 bid for re-election against Democratic challenger and former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy^note with Howard being replaced on her newscast by Marlene Sanders, who remained an anchor on News with the Woman's Touch until its cancellation in 1968. Sadly, Howard suffered a miscarriage in June 1965 and soon afterwards took her life via a barbiturate overdose at the age of only 39.
• Longtime investigative reporter Brian Ross and his producer Rhonda Schwartz were suspended and demoted by ABC in 2018 after Ross falsely reported that President Trump's disgraced national security advisor Michael Flynn would testify that Trump ordered him to contact the Russians during the 2016 campaign. The purported development was met with such astonishment that it single-handedly tanked the stock market, only for the network to retract the report and issue an apology when it turned out Ross's information was incorrect. Ross and Schwartz soon left ABC, with Ross joining the Law & Crime network shortly afterward.
• GMA3 co-anchors Amy Robach and T. J. Holmes were taken off of the morning news program in December 2022 after a tabloid disclosed that the two had been carrying on an extramarital affair. On January 27, 2023, they would both be officially let go by ABC News, ending a respective 10-year run on the program for Robach and an eight-year run for Holmes.

BBC

• Chat show host Robert Kilroy-Silk was fired by the BBC in 2004 after penning a column in a tabloid newspaper that contained offensive remarks towards Arabic people. He later decided to stand for Parliament instead.
• Peter Rippon and Liz Gibbons were replaced as editor and deputy editor of Newsnight respectively over two horrendous misfires in late 2012. First it was revealed that they had shelved a story a year earlier that would have posthumously revealed that BBC presenter Jimmy Savile had been a prolific sex offender^note The report investigating the circumstances behind the shelving determined that the process of reaching that decision had been "flawed" but had not been done as part of a coverup as had been popularly assumed., leading to massive blowback for the corporation when members of the Newsnight team took the story to ITV instead. Then they ran with a story that falsely implicated Lord McAlpine of child abuse, only for it to be discovered that McAlpine had been the victim of mistaken identity and that the Newsnight editors went forward with the story without conducting basic journalistic checks. The controversies also led to the resignation of the BBC's Director-General, George Entwistle, who had only been on the job for 54 days.
• Stuart Hall, known nationally as the host of It's a Knockout / Jeus sans Frontieres, was one of BBC North West's main news presenters between 1965 and 1990. Hall's contract with the BBC was terminated in 2013 after he pleaded guilty to charges of indecent assault and rape against underage girls, some of which were committed at BBC North West's studio facilities in Manchester.
• In July 2023, The Sun went live with an article claiming that a prominent BBC personality had paid a 17-year-old more than £35,000 in exchange for "sordid images". Several days later, it was revealed that longtime newsreader Huw Edwards had been the target of the article and that he had since been hospitalized for depression. Despite both the teenager, the authorities, and the BBC itself stating that no apparent crime had taken place, Edwards was nonetheless suspended and his future with the corporation remains murky as of writing.

CBS

• In late 2017, as part of the fallout from the Harvey Weinstein scandal, CBS fired morning anchor Charlie Rose after eight women (of what would become a total of thirty-five) accused him of habitual sexual misconduct dating back to the 1990s. His eponymous syndicated talk show on PBS was also cancelled.
  • The following year, nineteen current and former CBS employees came forward to accuse Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News and executive producer of 60 Minutes, allowed sexual harassment to take place throughout the news division and had himself engaged in inappropriate touching during company parties.
• CBS's The Talk was put on hiatus in March 2021 when co-host Sharon Osbourne defended Piers Morgan after he accused Meghan Markle of fabricating her story of feeling suicidal after being subjected to racist mistreatment by The British Royal Family (which quickly led to his departure from Good Morning Britain as mentioned below), leading to a tense exchange with her co-host Sheryl Underwood and a backlash from social media. Taping for The Talk was suspended pending an internal investigation by CBS. Accounts by former colleagues of racist behavior behind the scenes led to Osbourne exiting the show on March 26. She would be officially replaced by Jerry O'Connell in July 2021.
• Dan Rather stepped down from his 25-year position as anchor for the CBS Evening News after documents for a 2004 story on 60 Minutes II about George W. Bush's National Guard service turned out to be forged. His last broadcast for the Evening News was on March 9, 2005, and a year later, CBS announced that Rather would leave the network after 44 years; former Today host Katie Couric made her first broadcast with the Evening News on September 5, 2006. While the "Rathergate" debacle led to a Show-Ending Misdemeanor for 60 Minutes II—which was cancelled almost a year after the errant broadcast—Rather himself has continued his involvement in news, and his social media following helped launch a successful Career Resurrection in the late 2010s.
• Phyllis George was a former Miss America 1971 who gained additional fame for being one of the first women to cover sports on a national level with two stints as a co-host of CBS' The NFL Today pregame show from 1975-77 and 1980-84 while becoming the First Lady of Kentucky when her second husband, businessman John Y. Brown Jr., was elected to a term as the state's Governor. However, an incident in early 1985 largely ended her television career months after being transferred to CBS News as a co-host of CBS' perennial last-place morning newscast (branded at the time as CBS Morning News). In a May 1985 broadcast, George was interviewing Gary Dotson and Cathleen Crowell Webb shortly after Webb - who had initially accused Dotson of rape several years prior - experienced a religious awakening and ultimately admitted the accusation was false;^note despite the admission that the charge was false, Dotson would not be officially cleared of the charge until 1988; when DNA testing confirmed that the semen stain on Crowell's underwear was that of her boyfriend at the time with George then attempting to get the two to shake hands and, when that failed, suggested "How about a hug?" That comment, coming on the heels of a number of staffers at CBS News criticizing the hiring of George as a stunt since she had no experience in news of any sort, sparked significant criticism that resulted in her being fired after 8 months on CBS Morning News, upon which she was replaced by Maria Shriver. George would go on to write several books and be involved in the business world until her death in 2020 but never held a significant job on television after the "How about a hug" incident.

CNN

• During the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020, anchor Chris Cuomo repeatedly invited his older brother, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, onto his show to discuss updates on the virus, as Governor Cuomo was regarded as handling the initial U.S. outbreak quite well compared to the Trump Administration. Then, beginning in late 2020 and continuing into 2021, Governor Cuomo became engulfed in scandal when several women accused him of sexual misconduct, allegations which were detailed in a report by the New York attorney general, which eventually led to the governor's resignation. Eventually Chris was also terminated for secretly giving Andrew advice on how to handle the scandal and his own sexual misconduct allegations.
  • Shortly after Cuomo's ouster, his producer, John Griffin, was also suspended by CNN after he was arrested by the FBI for allegedly attempting to coax parents into sending their underage girls to his home in Vermont for "sexual training".
  • The Cuomo scandal would indirectly lead to the downfall of CNN president Jeff Zucker, who resigned in February 2022 after it was unveiled that he failed to disclose a (consensual) relationship with Allison Gollust, the network's executive vice president, when he was questioned as part of CNN's investigation into Chris Cuomo's actions. The investigation also discovered that, like Chris, both Zucker and Gollust had given Andrew Cuomo talking points in response to President Trump's criticism of his handling of the pandemic, a massive breach of journalistic ethics on par with what Chris had done.
• Kathy Griffin was kicked off of CNN's New Year's special in 2018 after she posted a photo of her holding a bloody, and what appeared to be decapitated, head of Donald Trump. She was condemned by multiple people on both sides of the political spectrum for the photoshoot, including Anderson Cooper, the host of said special. Her career has yet to recover, a combination of fallout from the scandal (including federal investigation and a spot on the No Fly List) and the COVID-19 Pandemic making touring exceptionally difficult.
• In August 2017, CNN commentator Jeffrey Lord was fired after tweeting a Nazi salute at a critic. Hours later, he responded with a claim that the tweet was meant to mock Nazis and fascists, but by then, the damage had already been done.
• Conservative columnist Robert Novak was suspended by CNN for one day after he got into an on-air argument with James Carville, which ended with Novak shouting, "I think that's bullshit", throwing off his microphone, and storming off the set. Novak retired from CNN a few months after the incident, but he denied that the two events were related.
• Rick Sanchez was fired after giving an interview to a satellite radio program in which, as part of an attack on Jon Stewart, insinuated that Jewish people owned the media and could not be considered a repressed minority. Despite Sanchez making several apologies, CNN fired him^note in a move that, ironically, Stewart opposed and he currently works for the Russian propaganda network RT.
• Former Pennsylvanian senator Rick Santorum lost his job as a senior political commentator at CNN after making racist remarks about Native Americans while giving a speech at a Young America Foundation event.
• Freelance producer Idris Mukhtar Ibrahim was fired from CNN on November 19, 2022, after pro-Israeli media watchdog HonestReporting dug up old anti-Semitic tweets he made regarding Argentinian pro footballer Lionel Messi during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Some of those tweets also contained support for the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
• Don Lemon, a longtime CNN anchor who had recently been transferred to the network's new morning show, was fired in April 2023 (coincidentally on the same day as Tucker Carlson; see the Fox News folder below). The specific reason why was unclear: many assumed the firing was related to seemingly sexist remarks Lemon had made about Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, which in turn led to an investigative article highlighting his alleged mistreatment of women behind the scenes, while insiders pointed to an interview between Lemon and another Republican candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, which CNN bosses reportedly felt was excessively combative.
• Chris Licht, who took over as chairman and CEO of CNN following Zucker's resignation in February 2022, was himself fired from these roles a little over a year later in June 2023 after multiple reports that employees had become unhappy with him over actions taken during his tenure. Licht's chairmanship had been marred by a series of boondoggles, perhaps the most serious being a town hall featuring former president Donald Trump which was largely seen as the network giving carte blanche to say whatever he wanted (as while it was nominally moderated by Kaitlan Collins, Trump largely interrupted her, at one point calling her a "nasty person"), as well as a widespread perception that Licht was self-centered and out-of-touch, which was reinforced by a deeply unflattering profile in The Atlantic. These mishaps, combined with CNN suffering its worst ratings drop in years (to the point where they were coming in fourth behind Newsmax) eventually led to Licht's exit.^note That may not be the end of the drama, however, as CNN's continuously downward revenue, combined with a $45 billion net debt load, has led to speculation that its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, will move to sell the network in the spring of 2024.

Fox News / Fox Business

• Fox News was hit with a series of scandals in 2016 and 2017, most of which were related to sexual harassment.
  • Roger Ailes, the CEO of Fox News and one of the most influential figures in Republican politics, was forced out of his position several weeks after former Fox & Friends host Gretchen Carlson sued him for sexual harassment. The suit led to a cascade of similar allegations against Ailes, some going back several decades, in which he allegedly harassed or outright extorted sex from female subordinates. However, it was accusations made by Megyn Kelly, Fox's rising prime-time anchor, that put the final nail in his coffin. Ailes was given the choice of either resigning or being fired from Fox News, leading Ailes to leave the network he had helmed since its inception with $40 million severance pay. He passed away shortly after in May 2017.
  • Bill O'Reilly was fired in April 2017 after The New York Times published a report detailing allegations of his inappropriate behavior toward female colleagues, and how Fox and O'Reilly paid five women about $13 million in total in exchange for agreements to not sue or speak about the allegations, prompting advertisers to flee The O'Reilly Factor in droves.
  • Bill Shine, Ailes' second-in-command, was the next to go, resigning on May 1, 2017, amid accusations of enabling Ailes' aforementioned behavior. After serving as Deputy White House Chief of Staff and 2020 campaign advisor to President Trump, Shine became a "consultant" for WGN America as it retooled itself into NewsNation.
  • Bob Beckel was fired from Fox News on May 19, 2017, after making insensitive remarks to an African American employee.
  • Jerusalem correspondent John Huddy was fired from Fox News after it investigated his connection to a "physical altercation." The news of his firing came after his sister Juliet, herself a former weekend co-host on Fox & Friends, revealed in an interview with fellow ex-employee Megyn Kelly on the Today show that O'Reilly got her fired from the network when she rejected his sexual advances.
• Joseph A. Cafasso was a regular national security analyst on Fox News in the early 2000s, claiming to have been a retired Special Forces colonel, a Silver Star recipient for service in Vietnam, and a participant in Operation Eagle Claw. In 2002, it was revealed that he was actually a Phony Veteran who had only completed forty-four days of basic training. Cafasso left the network soon after.
• Reporter Rudi Bakhtiar was dismissed from Fox News in 2007 after she reportedly rejected sexual advances from weekend anchor Brian Wilson. Wilson himself was dismissed from Fox News in 2010 when the matter came to light, with the breakup being described as "not pretty". Wilson currently hosts a local morning radio show in Nashville.
• John Gibson, a weekday Fox anchor who also hosted a syndicated radio show, caused a furor in January 2008 when, immediately after breaking the news of Heath Ledger's death to his listeners, he made a series of derogatory, homophobic jokes mocking Ledger for his performance in Brokeback Mountain. The cancellation of his Fox show one month later (ostensibly to make way for special election coverage) was linked by some to the controversy, though Fox continued to produce Gibson's radio show until 2017.
• Tobin Smith, a regular panelist on the weekend business show Bulls & Bears, was fired by Fox in November 2017 for accepting a $50,000 payment from an energy company to promote their stock on-air.
• Correspondent Thomas McInerney was fired in May 2018 after continuing to argue the long-debunked allegations that John McCain colluded with North Vietnam when he was a prisoner of war.
• To Fox News, it's one thing to do everything in your power to discredit Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct against her, but Slut-Shaming her is something else entirely, as now-ex-contributor Kevin Jackson learned the hard way.
• Conservative talking head Chris Farrell was banned from Fox News programming in October 2018 after claiming on Lou Dobbs Tonight that billionaire George Soros was funding a caravan of South American refugees heading for the United States border, just a few days after a bomb was sent to Soros' home by a believer of that conspiracy theory.
• Fox Business Network host Trish Regan found herself in controversy in March 2020 after claiming on her show that the Democrats were over-hyping the worldwide coronavirus outbreak in order to hurt the economy, calling it "yet another attempt to impeach" Donald Trump. Regan's remark drew so much outrage that even her fellow Fox host and Trump apologist Tucker Carlson chided her, and her show was put on hiatus by the end of that week. As the coronavirus crisis grew, the network canceled the show and parted ways with Regan before the month of March was out. The irony is that she wasn't the only one on Fox News or Fox Business who downplayed the coronavirus; notably, Sean Hannity also didn't take the outbreak seriously initially, making similar claims that it was hyped by the Democratic Party (though he later retracted his earlier comments, then outright denied that he ever made those remarks in the first place), which led to allegations that Regan was canned to prevent Fox from being sued for misinforming the public about COVID-19.
• Similar to the Trish Regan example, right-wing commentators Ineitha "Diamond" Hardaway and Herneitha "Silk" Richardson were dropped from the Fox Nation streaming service near the end of April 2020 after making several conspiratorial statements about the quarantine measures put in place to curb the spread of COVID-19. The duo were later hired by Newsmax and hosted a show on the network until Hardaway passed away in January 2023 of heart disease.
• Blake Neff resigned as head writer of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight in July 2020 after CNN revealed that he had been posting racist, sexist, and homophobic content on Twitter under a pseudonym.
• Anchor Ed Henry of America's Newsroom was fired on July 1, 2020, after an internal investigation established a pattern of sexual harassment on his part; ex-Fox News producer Jennifer Eckhart later came forward claiming Henry had brutally raped her. That same day, Fox's corporate cousin HarperCollins announced that its imprint would cancel the September publication of Henry's memoir Saving Colleen over the scandal. Later that month, Eckhart and regular Fox guest Cathy Areu sued Henry, Fox, and hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Howard Kurtz on charges of sexual misconduct and creating a hostile work environment for female employees. Henry eventually ended up on the far-right conspiracy outlet Real America's News.
• Fox & Friends First anchor Heather Childers was dismissed by Fox News on July 22, 2020, for causing a health scare at the office by showing up for work despite showing visible symptoms of coronavirus.
• Before she became finance chair of Donald Trump's re-election campaign and girlfriend of his son Donald Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle was one of the Trump Administration's loudest apologists as one of the co-hosts of The Five. Then, in June 2018, Guilfoyle left Fox News under mysterious circumstances; she insisted she left the network voluntarily, while media reports claimed that Guilfoyle had been dismissed for engaging in lewd workplace behavior. It was eventually revealed that Fox secretly paid a $4 million settlement to a female assistant of Guilfoyle's^note who Guilfoyle shared with anchor Eric Bolling, himself ousted over sexual harassment allegations; see "Serial Offenders" below who had written a 42-page draft complaint detailing instances of Guilfoyle: showing the assistant images of genitalia belonging to men Guilfoyle had slept with; requiring the assistant to work at Guilfoyle's New York apartment while Guilfoyle walked around naked; telling the assistant to submit to a co-worker's demands for sexual favors; trying to buy the assistant's silence when Fox brought in a legal team to investigate workplace misconduct in the wake of the Ailes scandal; and blackmailing the assistant when she refused the payout, at the same time pretending to be a supporter of the #MeToo movement.
• Harlan Z. Hill, an advisor for Donald Trump's 2020 campaign and frequent Fox contributor, was blacklisted from the network in October 2020 after calling then-Senator Kamala Harris an "insufferable lying bitch" in a tweet.
• Melissa Francis, one of the panelists on Outnumbered and co-anchor of Fox Business's After the Bell, quietly disappeared from Fox's airwaves in October 2020 with no mention from the network about her whereabouts. Insiders claimed a couple of weeks afterward that Francis had been fired over a long-running pay dispute between her and Fox, with Francis taking issue with the network's gender-based pay disparity.
• Roger Friedman, who wrote an entertainment column for the network's website, was fired in April 2009 after he reviewed a leaked copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine before its theatrical release and boasted about how easy it was to pirate the movie. The incident was particularly embarrassing for the network because the film was distributed by their at-the-time sister company 20th Century Fox, who had been investigating the leak.
• Andrew Napolitano, a former New Jersey judge and longtime Fox commentator, first ran into trouble in 2017 when he made a remark about a then-postulated conspiracy theory from President Trump about being wiretapped by President Obama, resulting in him being suspended for two weeks. Then in 2019, Napolitano's on-air appearances were drastically reduced, allegedly following a meeting between Rupert Murdoch and Attorney General William Barr, after Napolitano had repeatedly criticized the Trump Administration. Finally, in 2021, Fox announced that it had "parted ways" with Napolitano after a Fox producer accused Napolitano of sexually harassing him and several other men.
• Fox News's deliberate airing of lies regarding the 2020 presidential election not only made the network vulnerable to reputation-damaging lawsuits but left a trail of dead or dying careers in its wake:
  • Chris Stirewalt, Fox's politics editor and the man in charge of their decision desk during the election, was let go in January 2021 amidst a round of layoffs. Many attributed this to Fox jumping the gun to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night before the other networks, which reportedly angered then-president Trump and caused his supporters to dump Fox for more extreme right-wing outlets such as Newsmax and OANN (this was eventually confirmed in a 2023 New York Times piece). Bill Sammon, Fox's Washington managing editor, was let go for the same reason.
  • Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, who had previously left CNN over his strident anti-immigration views, saw his show abruptly cancelled in February 2021 (despite it being Fox Business' highest-rated show) the day after he was named as a defendant in a $2.7 billion lawsuit filed by the voting machine company Smartmatic in response to his propagation of baseless conspiracy theories (echoed by other Fox personalities like Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo, who are facing similar lawsuits) claiming the company helped rig the election against Trump.^note Dobbs had already become a legal liability due to a civil case brought by the family of Seth Rich, which was settled around the time of the 2020 election. Rich was a young DNC staffer whose murder in 2016 (believed by police to have been the result of a botched robbery) became the center of a “Clinton body count” conspiracy theory linking him to the DNC leaks. Dobbs was a particularly ardent supporter of this conspiracy and Fox paid to settle the family's lawsuit the day before both he and Sean Hannity were set to sit for a deposition. Although this settlement was not nearly as large as the nine-figure Dominion settlement, it was another strike against him.
  • By far the most high-profile casualty (so far) was Tucker Carlson, whose abrupt firing in April 2023 rocked the media world.^note This earned Carlson the dubious distinction of having been fired by all three major cable news networks (Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN) as well as PBS, although in those previous three instances, the firings were the result of Carlson's programs being cancelled. However, the exact thing that caused his firing is unclear thanks to the conflicting accounts given by Fox insiders, even though all of them agree that the exit was not amicable.^note Carlson subsequently befriended right-wing tech billionaire Elon Musk and relaunched his show on Twitter, which led Fox to threaten legal action for breach of contract.
    • Carlson's firing had come just days after Fox paid a whopping $787 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by election software vendor Dominion Voting Systems. Many Fox insiders pointed to private texts by Carlson, uncovered during the lawsuit's discovery phase, indicating that he (and other Fox personalities) knowingly lied to Fox's audience about the election, making him a dangerous liability to the network as it is still facing the aforementioned suit brought by Smartmatic (who as of writing are demanding an even bigger award than Dominion had and made it clear they will not settle). Sources close to Carlson, in fact, have claimed that he was indeed fired as a condition in the Dominion settlement, and that Fox had broken an agreement with Carlson not to agree to a settlement if it would be interpreted as an admission of wrongdoing.
    • The texts unearthed by Dominion also threatened Fox in a separate lawsuit brought by Carlson's former producer, Abby Grossberg, who accused him of sexist behavior behind the scenes. Particularly noteworthy were texts in which he engaged in Country Matters while discussing Trump attorney Sidney Powell and an unnamed female Fox executive. Outtakes were also leaked online which showed him making pejorative remarks, sometimes in front of female staffers. (Grossberg also accused Fox of pressuring her to commit perjury in the Dominion suit.) Fox ultimately agreed to settle Grossberg's suit for $12 million in June 2023.
    • The unnamed executive who had incurred Carlson's wrath was widely believed to be Irena Briganti, Fox's longtime PR chief. One report claimed that the feud between the two — which one source described as a "death match" — was so bad that Carlson unsuccessfully lobbied other execs, including Rupert Murdoch's son Lachlan, to have Briganti fired. This apparently backfired and damaged Carlson's relations with Fox management, which only got worse as he started acting as if he was bigger than the network. The texts dug up by Dominion also revealed that Carlson privately badmouthed his bosses around that time.
    • Fox insiders also pointed to one specific text, written during the January 6 insurrection, in which Carlson witnessed several rioters assaulting an Antifa protester on television and admitted a desire to root for the mob, while at the same time complaining the 3-on-1 brawl was "not how white men fight." These comments reportedly doomed Carlson, though many questioned why this private text drove them to fire him when he regularly spewed similarly inflammatory rhetoric to his cable audience.
  • Former Tucker Carlson Tonight managing editor Alexander McCaskill, already under the gun due to being named in former Fox employee Abby Grossberg's wrongful termination lawsuit alleging a toxic workplace, was fired in June 2023 for putting up a chyron calling president Joe Biden a "wannabe dictator" following former president Donald Trump's arraignment for his willful retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence despite being repeatedly asked by the feds to return them.
• Longtime Fox exec John Finley was fired in September 2023 for stalking and sexually harassing a female staffer. Besides that, it was alleged that Finley had inappropriate relations with other female employees, including one whom he married and later divorced.

GBNews

• In May 2021, former Boris Johnson staffer Guto Harri was hired as a presenter for the British news channel GBNews, which explicitly bills itself as a right-leaning, "anti-woke" network. Two months later, Harri expressed support for the English football team's taking the knee to protest racism and took the knee himself on-air in solidarity. This immediately triggered a backlash from GBNews's audience, who launched a boycott in response (causing the fledgling network to attract zero, literally zero, viewers) while GBNews itself suspended Harri indefinitely for failing to meet their expectations. Harri instead resigned from GBNews and denounced the network as a far-right "absurd parody" of the cancel culture they claimed to oppose.
• GBNews fired its guest host, actor-turned-far-right firebrand Laurence Fox, for making misogynistic comments towards Ava Evans of the left-leaning news website Joe in September 2023. On the same day that he was fired, Fox found himself in further trouble when he was booked for encouraging vandals to damage the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) cameras used in London's congestion zone.

ITV

• Phillip Schofield, the longtime presenter for This Morning, was forced to resign in May 2023 after engaging in an affair with a 20-year-old production assistant (Schofield had first met his lover when he was 15, and was himself in his fifties when the affair began) and lying to ITV bosses about it. Schofield was subsequently dropped by his talent agency and the Prince's Trust, and was subject to accusations by multiple former co-workers of fostering a toxic work environment.

Local TV news

• On November 23, 1976, following a report on a rape incident involving an eight-year-old resident of Queens on WABC-TV's 6PM Eyewitness News broadcast, weatherman Tex Antoine opened his weather forecast by remarking, "with rape so predominant in the news lately, it is well to remember the words of Confucius: 'If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it'." Approximately 665 calls, mainly from women who expressed considerable outrage over the remark, were made to WABC over this statement. Although Antoine apologized for the statement toward the end of the 6PM weather report, the remark led to him immediately being put on suspension, with then-weekend weather reporter Storm Field taking his place. For most of December 1976, WABC-TV stated it had made no decision on Antoine's future,^note On December 2, 1976, however, word came in that ABC executives told Antoine, then vacationing in the Virgin Islands, that he would still be on the job. but calls to demand Antoine's firing were made loud and clear outside of ABC's New York headquarters by members of the National Organization for Women. On December 18, 1976, Antoine was reinstated in a non-televised role, as supervisor of forecasts provided by Field. This went on for approximately four months; the station did not renew his contract upon its expiration in March 1977. Antoine briefly served as the weatherman for WNEW-TV (now WNYW) in 1978, then disappeared from the same New York television screens where he had debuted (on WNBC) in 1949. He died on January 12, 1983, at age 59.
• Homer Cilley, the executive producer for the local news on now-defunct Boston station WNAC-TV, was fired in April 1980 after he allowed the airing, as an April Fools' joke, of a story which claimed that Great Blue Hill, a local landmark near Milton, Massachusetts, had suffered a volcanic eruption. The report caused several Milton residents to flee their homes, and led to the station being flooded with angry phone calls; the fact that the segment aired less than a week after the Mount St. Helens eruption did not help matters, nor did the fact that WNAC was at the center of a lengthy licensing dispute between the FCC and the station's owner; RKO General; which was eventually stripped of WNAC two years later after an appeal by RKO General to the Supreme Court was refused.
• John Sanders, a technology reporter for WBAL-TV in Baltimore, was fired in February 2009 after doctoring a video of Fox News anchor John Gibson (no stranger to controversy himself; see the Fox folder above) which made it appear as if he had compared then-Attorney General Eric Holder (who is black) to a monkey, which promptly got picked up and misreported by several news outlets.
• NBC affiliate WSLS in Roanoke, Virginia, was rocked by not one but two examples of this trope in 2006. First, popular weatherman Marc Lamarre was fired after being hospitalized following a near-fatal heroin overdose. Jamey Singleton, another WSLS weatherman, then admitted that he himself had issues with heroin, but was given a second chance upon going into rehab...only for that chance to be squandered over a completely different matter when a nude photo of Singleton turned up on MySpace; he was fired for violating the "morals clause" of his contract.
  • Apparently WSLS weathermen have a looooong history with drugs. Forty years before the Lamarre-Singleton incident, WSLS fired meteorologist Floyd "Marty" Hall after he was arrested for possession of marijuana.
• In 2007, reporter Amy Jacobson was quickly fired by Chicago NBC affiliate WMAQ after photographic evidence emerged of her sharing a hot tub with Craig Stebic, whose wife's disappearance (which remains unsolved as of 2021, with Craig as a person of interest) Jacobson had been assigned to cover.
• Julie Tremmel, a Rhode Island television reporter, was fired from NBC affiliate WJAR in 2014 after she did a handstand at the end of a live report outside of an America's Got Talent audition. Tremmel was well known in the area for both her offbeat reporting on lighter stories - particularly a very strange piece she did about avoiding bear attacks, which went viral - and her solid work as an investigative crime reporter, and the news of her firing was received very negatively by the public and other local media outlets. She ultimately sued the station for wrongful termination and received an out-of-court settlement.
• Seattle's Fox affiliate fired one of their editors after viewers pointed out the station had aired doctored (amateurishly, so it was said) footage of President Trump during a newscast in January 2019.
• In June 2015, Atlanta CBS affiliate WGCL-TV hired Ben Swann, a former personality of the Russian state-controlled television network Russia Today (RT), to anchor their 11pm weeknight newscasts. Swann immediately used his platform at WGCL to launch a segment called "Reality Check", in which he frequently presented fringe conspiracy theories (including alt-right and anti-vaccine propaganda) as straight news. After a 2017 segment on the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, Swann's bosses at WGCL briefly suspended him and discontinued the "Reality Check" segment. Then Swann was fired in 2018 when his bosses discovered that he was going behind their backs to secretly bring back "Reality Check". Swann eventually returned to RT.
• Angel Cardenas, a reporter and features editor of Sacramento station KMAX-TV, did a morning show segment in which he visited an auto show and proceeded to manhandle a bunch of classic Thunderbirds (as well as a brand new Ford Explorer Hybrid) on display, jumping on the hood one vehicle and carelessly dinging the door of another, all the while bragging that the owners weren't around to stop him. The organizers of the auto show contacted KMAX to complain and were told that Cardenas had already been fired.
• Happened not once but twice to former Pittsburgh news anchor Wendy Bell. First, in 2016, Bell was fired by ABC affiliate WTAE for writing a Facebook post that made racist assumptions about the perpetrators of a local shooting, writing that they were "young black men" who had "multiple siblings from multiple fathers and their mothers work multiple jobs." Bell eventually landed at KDKA-AM^note not a corporate sibling of CBS affiliate KDKA-TV, despite the similar call letters and branding, where she was placed on indefinite suspension in September 2020 for another Facebook post in which she called for Black Lives Matter protesters who defaced public monuments to be shot "on sight."
• News anchor Alaina Pinto was fired by Boston independent station WHDH in October 2020 for appearing in Adam Sandler's film Hubie Halloween. Pinto had filmed her appearance, a brief cameo in which she gives a newscast dressed as the Suicide Squad (2016) version of Harley Quinn, the year before. However, appearing in the movie violated her contract with the station, and she was let go shortly after the film's premiere on Netflix.
• Mike Davis, the longtime, and at one time, chief WBNS-TV meteorologist was canned after he was arrested for possessing child pornography. He was eventually sentenced to four years in prison after delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Chicago sportscaster Mark Giangreco of ABC station WLS-TV was fired in March 2021 after he cracked a joke on-air two months earlier about how news anchor Cheryl Burton could "play the ditzy, combative interior decorator" on a hypothetical DIY fix-up show. Burton went to management to complain, leading to Giangreco's dismissal.
• In 2005, Tribune Media Services ended conservative commentator Armstrong Williams' syndicated television show after USA Today revealed that he had been paid $240,000 by the Bush Administration to promote the controversial No Child Left Behind Act during his broadcasts.
• Ivory Hecker, a reporter for Fox affiliate KRIV in Houston, announced that Fox had terminated her in June 2021 after she alleged during a live segment that the network had "muzzled" her (over what later turned out to be an attempt on her part to promote the discredited COVID-19 treatment hydroxychloroquine) and revealed that she had leaked recordings of station managers to the far-right activist group Project Veritas.
• April Moss was a meteorologist for CBS-owned WWJ in Detroit who was fired around the same time as Hecker for comparing her employer's COVID-19 vaccination policy to segregation. Like Hecker, Moss was quickly picked up by Project Veritas and another far-right outlet, Real America's Voice.
• Meteorologist and anti-vaxxer Karl Bohnak was fired from his 33-year employment at WLUC-TV in Marquette, Michigan, for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine as mandated by the station's owners, Gray Television.
• Meteorologist Scott Stevens was fired by WRGB-TV in Albany, New York, in 1995 when station management learned that he had lied on his resume about his credentials and that he had "never completed the necessary academic course of studies that would lead him to the official title of meteorologist." Stevens subsequently moved back to his native Idaho and served as meteorologist for KPVI-TV in Pocatello for nine years, only for him to quit (not fired) in 2005 after he set up a website claiming that the Japanese yazuka had used a weather-controlling machine to cause Hurricane Katrina.
• Tony Burden was an anchor and news director for Norfolk, VA ABC affiliate WVEC-TV 13 until resigning under pressure in 1978 after being arrested following a traffic stop for marijuana possession the previous summer. Burden would resurface at Minneapolis-St. Paul independent station KMSP-TV 9^note which had just lost its ABC affiliation due to struggling to emerge from a long period of struggles during the 1970s for a few years before fading into obscurity; while Burden's replacement, former ABC News correspondent Jim Kincaid, would prove a popular anchor with his network experience and folksy commentary; known as "Jim's Notes", remaining with WVEC until his retirement in 1996.
• Meteorologist Jeremy Kappell was sacked from Rochester, NY NBC affiliate WHEC in January 2019 after he used a racial slur when referring to a local park named after civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. Kappell then sued the station for wrongful termination, but an appeals court dismissed his argument in August 2021.
• Political commentator Bill Crane was fired from Atlanta, GA-based ABC affiliate WSB in August 2022 for calling former president Donald Trump "orange face" on air.
• Morning anchor Ken Rosato was fired from New York City-based ABC affiliate WABC-TV in May 2023 for a hot mic insult he made towards co-anchor Shirleen Allicot.

Newsmax

• Just as he predicted, conservative host Dennis Michael Lynch was fired in August 2016 for focusing too much on pro-Trump commentary and because he rejected his bosses' demands for more editorial control over his program. Not helping matters was his steadfast support for his ex-boss and then-CEO of Fox News Roger Ailes, who himself was embroiled in sexual harassment lawsuits filed by former hosts Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson, something that led to Ailes's resignation (see the Fox News folder above).
• Newsmax fired two of their hosts for COVID-19 misinformation-related controversies within weeks of each other in November 2021:
  • Reporter Emerald Robinson, no stranger to incendiary remarks, was taken off air after posting a tweet that claimed that COVID-19 vaccines "contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked." Twitter initially suspended her account, then permabanned her when she doubled down on the conspiracy theory, forcing Newsmax to distance itself from her statements. Newsmax later let her contract lapse in January 2022.
  • Just weeks after Robinson's ouster, former Trump adviser Steve Cortes, who was hired six months earlier, was sacked for badmouthing Newsmax's COVID-19 vaccination policy and called President Joe Biden's vaccine mandates "medical apartheid." Reportedly, Cortes also didn't get along with his co-workers and his ratings kept on tanking. The anti-vax comments and Cortes openly bashing his employer were simply the last straws.
• Grant Stinchfield was fired from the network in July 2022. While reportedly it was his low viewership ratings compared to Tucker Carlson's on Fox News despite sharing the same timeslot that forced Newsmax to drop him, Stinchfield himself claims that he was fired for refusing to attack Carlson. For what it's worth, Stinchfield's slot was later taken over by Eric Bolling, who even called Carlson "an alleged American" for spewing pro-Russian propaganda amidst the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

NBC / MSNBC / CNBC

• Contrary to popular belief, NBC weekend anchor Jessica Savitch was not fired following her performance on a short NBC News Digest segment on October 3, 1983, in which her speech was slurred and almost incoherent, reportedly a result of cocaine abuse. While she did sign a one-year contract with the network afterwards, however, that was two years less than her previous three-year contracts. Whether the incident would actually impact her career became a moot issue when, three weeks later, she was killed in a car accident along with her boyfriend.
• Dateline got into hot water when a 1992 segment falsely claimed that 1973-1987 GM pickup trucks had leaky and explosive gas tanks (when in reality, the only reason they exploded for the cameras was the remote controlled explosives the NBC crew put there). This resulted in the firing of two Dateline producers and Michele Gillen (the correspondent involved in the segment) getting transferred to NBC's affiliate in Miami, where she became an anchor of the station's evening newscasts.
• Conservative political commentator Mark Halperin was fired from NBC News in October 2017 after several women came forward filing sexual harassment charges against him.
• Billy Bush, co-host of the third hour of Today, was caught up in the audiotape scandal that nearly ended Donald Trump's presidential campaign. The tape was an outtake from a 2005 interview between Trump and Bush, then anchor for Access Hollywood, in which Trump infamously boasted about his predilection for sexual assault, bragging that he could "grab [women] by the pussy" and force them into sex because of his fame. Trump talked at length about sleeping with Nancy O'Dell, Bush's Access Hollywood co-anchor, with Bush joking and playing along. NBC initially tried to shield Bush from scrutiny, but public outcry forced the network to suspend and eventually fire him from Today. A lot of people, however, came out of the woodwork to defend him after his firing, claiming that he got fired while Trump was still allowed to run for president, even though most people agreed Trump's comments on the video were far worse than Bush's. In the long run, it ended up being an aversion for both of them; Billy Bush made his way back to the airwaves as host of syndicated tabloid show Extra in 2019, while Donald Trump ended up being elected president nonetheless, although he would lose reelection four years later.
• Phil Donahue's highly-rated prime-time talk show on MSNBC was cancelled in 2003 when he expressed opposition to the impending war in Iraq.
• Michael Savage, a far-right shock jock, was let go by MSNBC later that same year when he made disparaging comments about AIDS in response to a crank caller.
• Don Imus simulcasted his Imus in the Morning radio show on MSNBC until he referred to the black players on the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hoes" in 2007. Imus was dropped from MSNBC and CBS Radio in the face of a firestorm, and Imus eventually ended up on Fox Business Network.
• Alec Baldwin's late-night MSNBC show was canceled after Alec allegedly called a reporter a "cocksucking faggot" off air. He had been suspended by the network for at least two weeks until it was decided to have the plug pulled permanently.
• Melissa Harris-Perry was terminated from MSNBC following a dispute with execs over her show's constant pre-emptions and lack of editorial freedoms due to coverage of the 2016 presidential campaigns. She attributed this to the network's refusal to let her analyze the music video for Beyoncé's song "Formation," a protest song examining police violence against African-Americans. This prompted her to refuse to visit the studio the weekend of her eventual firing, and that line-crossing led to network executives canceling her show and terminating her contract.
• Chris Matthews' abrupt retirement in March 2020 had been in the making for a while, but the timing of it certainly makes it come off this way. In the weeks before, Matthews had been sharply criticized for comparing Senator Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign with the Nazi invasion of France, which earned scorn from both sides of the political sphere because members of Sanders' family had been killed in the Holocaust. An interview he conducted with Senator Elizabeth Warren a few days after his Sanders comments was also criticized for his condescending and disbelieving tone. On air, Matthews also admitted to another reason for his departure: A sexual harassment allegation made by a female reporter he once had on as a guest.
• In a case of series-ending misdemeanor, NBC's highly controversial To Catch a Predator specials were quietly discontinued after one of their stings went horribly awry. While shooting a special in Texas, NBC and the cyber-vigilante group Perverted-Justice traced incriminating chat logs, from a predator seeking sex from what he thought was a 13-year-old boy, to local district attorney Louis Conradt. NBC was later determined to have pressured law enforcement into rushing an arrest warrant against Conradt, in the hopes of getting sensational footage of his capture, only for the ploy to backfire badly when Conradt holed himself in his house and killed himself by gunshot (with police and NBC's camera crew outside). NBC later settled a wrongful death claim by Conradt's sister, while host Chris Hansen announced that To Catch a Predator had ended, stating simply that "we made our point". Perverted-Justice fell apart in the wake of the scandal, announcing in 2018 (after their site had gone since 2010 without updates) that they would be ending their sting operations.
  • Hansen himself would later personally fall victim to this trope in 2011, after the National Enquirer published photos of him engaging in an extramarital affair with Kristyn Caddell, a reporter for NBC station WPTV in West Palm Beach, Florida. What grabbed people's attention about the affair was that Hansen, who had styled himself as a moral crusader against sexual predators, was sleeping with a woman who was twenty years his junior. NBC allowed Hansen's contract to expire (he had previously been tapped as the new anchor for Dateline) while Caddell was fired by WPTV and struggled to find a job in local TV for several years. These days Hansen is known for his attempted comeback via his YouTube channel, with his popularity and influence a shadow of what it once was, while Caddell eventually started writing articles for Good Morning America.
• Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News claimed on the January 30, 2015 episode of the program that he was inside a helicopter that was shot down by enemy fire in Iraq during the U.S. invasion more than a decade ago. However, his story immediately fell under scrutiny by surviving passengers of that helicopter, stating he was in a different helicopter that arrived shortly thereafter. Williams apologized and recanted the story a month later, but that did not stop NBC from launching an investigation into Williams regarding the event. He later voluntarily suspended himself from Nightly a day after the investigation was launched, with the network then following by asking him to take six months unpaid leave. Shortly before the suspension ended, NBC announced that he would be demoted to Breaking News anchor at MSNBC, while his longtime colleague and interim host Lester Holt was announced as his permanent replacement. Despite the scandal, Williams enjoyed a Career Resurrection by the end of the 2010s as host of MSNBC's The 11th Hour.
• Matt Lauer, who had co-hosted NBC's Today for 20 years, was given the boot by the network in late 2017 after several allegations of his inappropriate sexual behavior towards women were made public, with it later being revealed in Ronan Farrow's book Catch and Kill that Lauer was accused of raping former staffer Brooke Nevils during coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and that representatives of disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein used Lauer's misbehavior as leverage to pressure NBC into killing Farrow's story into Weinstein.
• After the Roger Ailes fiasco went down, Megyn Kelly jumped ship to NBC. She proved controversial from day one, as her extreme opinions often led to incidents like a widely-ridiculed interview with notorious alt-right conspiracy peddler Alex Jones, and picking a fight with the famously liberal Jane Fonda. But the last straw came in October 2018, when she went on a bizarre rant during an on-air panel that was widely seen as a defense of blackface as a Halloween costume—even insisting the practice was considered perfectly okay during her childhood in the 1970s. The resulting deluge of online attacks, including from people close to her age letting her know that this was decidedly not the case, rendered Kelly so radioactive that even though she ultimately apologized for her remarks, NBC dropped her, released a special report distancing themselves from her—and embarrassed her further by showing a notorious report she'd made at Fox News attacking the idea of black people playing Santa Claus. A few days later, the cast of House of Cards (US) (no stranger to devastating controversy itself) pulled out of their scheduled appearance on her show Megyn Kelly Today, which was cancelled shortly afterwards. An NBC exec hinted that Kelly, now all but blacklisted by the journalism industry^note An ABC executive said his network wouldn't hire her in a million years after her comments, and Fox News stated they had no interest in taking her back., might be merely the first to lose their job in the aftermath, calling the non-break deal she had signed with NBC a gigantic mistake on the part of the negotiators, and the network contemplated for a long while whether or not to pay off Kelly with the $69 million she was offered as part of her long-term contract before eventually acquiescing.
• Briefly the case with Sam Seder, a left-wing commentator and MSNBC contributor who fell victim to a smear campaign by far-right troll Mike Cernovich, the same guy who temporarily got James Gunn kicked off of the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie. In 2017, Cernovich found a tweet made by Seder which made an off-color joke about film director and fugitive child rapist Roman Polański^note "Don't care re Polanski, but I hope if my daughter is ever raped it is by an older truly talented man w/ a great sense of mise en scene.", took the tweet wildly out-of-context to suggest that Seder had tacitly endorsed Polanski's crime, then shopped the "scoop" to multiple news outlets. MSNBC decided to fire Seder, a decision which was met with scorn by other journalists — including some of MSNBC's own personalities. Faced with dissent within their own ranks and unnerved by the celebratory reaction to the firing by right-wing trolls, MSNBC admitted they made a mistake and reversed their decision days later. Seder currently hosts a simulcast of the political talk radio program The Majority Report on NBC's streaming service Peacock.
• Professional wrestler and stock market analyst John "Bradshaw" Layfield was fired from his contributing role with CNBC after he gave Nazi salutes and goose-stepped at a WWE house show in Germany. ^note  On the episode of SmackDown following this, however, neither the commentators nor JBL himself when discussing it would actually say what he was fired for, likely due to the Nazi associations, only saying that he was fired "for acting like a wrestler" Such actions are illegal in Germany, but Layfield claimed he did it order to draw Cheap Heat for his heel wrestling character. It caused such controversy in both the U.S. and Germany that CNBC let him go. He later found a job with Fox News. As for WWE, they apologized for the controversy and reprimanded Layfield, but did not fire him.
• Tiffany Cross, a weekend anchor for MSNBC, was let go in November 2022 following her comments during an interview with Charlemagne Tha God on the latter's Comedy Central show, in which Cross said, "Let's castrate Florida," referring to a state that the Democratic Party could afford to lose in the Midterm Elections.^note For context, in recent Midterm and Presidential elections, Florida has voted Republican. While Cross herself was no stranger to controversial comments, it was this particular comment that made her bosses feel that enough was enough.
• In one of the fastest examples of this trope, in March 2024, NBC News hired Ronna McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, as an on-air analyst for that year's presidential campaign. This decision was immediately met with universal criticism, especially from MSNBC's liberal audience, due to McDaniel being widely seen a loyal lapdog for Donald Trump who allegedly participated in his scheme to overturn the 2020 presidental election, to the point where she was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in Special Counsel Jack Smith's case before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The hiring triggered a mutiny within NBC News as well, with journalists on the network side expressing concern about McDaniel's truthfulness and almost every one of the left-wing opinion hosts on the cable side directly attacking McDaniel and the decision to hire her during on-air monologues.^note McDaniel would retract her original statements about Trump and the 2020 election during her appearance on Meet the Press. In the midst of severe backlash, NBC parted ways with McDaniel just four days after she was hired.

Newspapers

• The New York Times:
  • Bosley Crowther, the paper's film critic from 1940 to 1968, likely had his career end due to his scathing reviews of 1967's Bonnie and Clyde. His scorn for the film and its depictions of violence was not unusual in its first few weeks of release but critical reception of the film soon shifted, particularly after rave reviews from a younger generation of critics like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael. While some previously negative critics changed tune, Crowther stood his ground on his negative opinion of the film, writing three additional reviews and even blasting it in reviews of completely different movies. By the end of the year, Crowther's repeated attacks on the film made him seem like he was out of touch with modern cinema. It is widely believed his repeated panning of Bonnie and Clyde was why the Times decided to replace Crowther as their primary film critic by early 1968. Renata Adler briefly served as Crowther's replacement before Vincent Canby, a Times critic who had loved Bonnie and Clyde, became the paper's chief critic for 25 years.
  • James Bennett, the editor of the Times opinion page, stepped down in June 2020 after backlash from him greenlighting a piece from Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) in which he urged President Trump to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military to put down the Black Lives Matter protests that sprung up after the murder of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis.
  • In January 2021, Times freelance editor Lauren Wolfe tweeted that she felt "chills" watching a plane carrying Joe Biden land in Washington, D.C. ahead of the president-elect's inauguration. Critics of the paper (starting with Glenn Greenwald) and right-wing trolls immediately seized upon the tweet and mounted a harassment campaign, resulting in Wolfe's sudden firing 36 hours later.
• The Washington Post:
  • Reporter Marwa Eltagouri was fired after the Post discovered she had used reporting from other newspapers without proper attribution in several of her articles for the paper.
  • The Post was hit with this twice in June 2022, both springing from the same incident. First, political reporter David Weigel was suspended for a month without pay after he retweeted a sexist joke; he would ultimately leave the paper for the news website Semafor three months later. Then Felicia Sonmez, who had publicly taken offense to the retweet, was fired a few days later when she repeatedly criticized other Post reporters and editors for what she considered to be sexist and racist attitudes that affected the workplace.
• During part of the 1970s, the main movie reviewer for a newspaper in Nebraska was running a "teen reviewer" program. Kids/young teens would sign up with the paper to be taken to a movie by the reviewer, and would then write a review of it for publication. Then that reviewer was arrested for pedophilia, and the whole "teen reviewer" operation vanished at light speed.
• Bob Greene, a popular syndicated columnist based at the Chicago Tribune known in part for his sentimental columns about family, lost his column and his job at the Tribune after he admitted to an extramarital affair with a high school student.
• Helen Thomas, a renowned member of the White House press corps who served through ten presidential administrations, abruptly retired from Hearst Newspapers in October 2010 amidst controversy after she demanded that Israel "get the hell out of Palestine" and, later, denied that Jews were a persecuted group. Thomas subsequently made further remarks referring to "Zionist" control of U.S. politics and media, pretty much guaranteeing that no major media company would ever hire her despite her otherwise distinguished career. Those later comments also resulted in both her alma mater Wayne State University and the Society of Professional Journalists discontinuing awards named in her honor. Thomas spent her remaining years writing sporadic columns for a small Virginia newspaper before passing away in 2013.
• The News of the World phone-hacking scandal didn't just end careers, it killed off an entire publication and additionally hobbled the print media industry in the UK. It also destroyed Rupert Murdoch's political clout at least in Britain, as evidenced not as much by his stoop-shouldered humility before a Parliamentary ethics hearing as that ranking officials who deferred to him before began to publicly diss and dismiss him.^note It's a completely different story in the United States, as his ownership of Fox News continues to make him influential in American right-wing politics.
• Controversial British tabloid journalist Mazher Mahmood, also known as the "Fake Sheikh" for disguising himself as a sheikh for his many sting operations, saw his career end once and for all in 2014, and by his own sting no less. In 2013, Mahmood had posed as a film producer offering singer and The X Factor judge Tulisa Contostavlos a role in a Hollywood blockbuster starring opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and then told her he needed a "bad girl" in the role and made her act as a ghetto girl, and then later on, asked her to supply him cocaine, which she did through a friend. The story made the headlines and she was arrested. The evidence from it was being used to prosecute her for drug offenses in 2014, but on the fourth day of the trial, it came to light that Mahmood had pressured his driver, Adam Smith, into changing a statement, a cat that was out of the bag when his driver was being proofed as a witness and wound up telling the defense lawyers he had emailed Mahmood his statement, which he would more or less admit to, conflicting with his statement in a pre-trial hearing that he never discussed said statement with Smith, causing the trial to collapse. Making matters worse, the altered statement removed a piece of a conversation Smith had with Contostavlos where she stated she was against drugs and only played up the drug dealer persona so she could secure the supposed acting job once and for all. Things went even further downhill when a Panorama investigation later that year revealed Mahmood had been using illegal and unethical methods to obtain scoops, which included, among others, making payments to third parties who procured the drugs that his targets would later be exposed as supplying. After the Tulisa trial collapse, he was immediately suspended by the Sun tabloid, eventually convicted of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, along with evidence tampering, and sentenced to sixteen months in prison. The Sun would later fire him following his conviction.
• The Sun columnist and former chief editor Kelvin MacKenzie published an article in April 2017 about Everton midfielder Ross Barkley that not only attracted claims of racism but also claimed that the only people in Liverpool that made comparable salaries were "drug dealers". The article was outrageous on its own, but MacKenzie's past stoked the flames even further: During his tenure as editor, The Sun ran front-page coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster,^note a human crush that, at 96 fatalities and 766 injuries, still remains the deadliest sporting disaster in the UK falsely accusing Liverpool FC fans of causing the tragedy (when it was the result of abysmal crowd control), attacking victims, and attacking and urinating on responding police officers. To add even more salt to the wound, the allegations were led with the headline "The Truth". This one-sided coverage of the disaster rendered the paper anathema on Merseyside (to the point that there's still an active boycott movement against The Sun, trying to give it away in Liverpool remains virtually impossible, and few newsagents in the city even carry it anymore), and the Barkley controversy resulted in Everton joining Liverpool FC in banning the paper from reporting at their grounds.^note Liverpool FC had formally kicked out The Sun two months before Everton issued its own ban, although their manager Jurgen Klopp had already refused to take questions from the paper. As for MacKenzie, he was suspended on April 14th (a day before the 28th anniversary of Hillsborough, no less), and his contract with The Sun was "terminated by mutual consent" a few weeks later.
• Famed sportswriter Bill Conlin resigned from the Philadelphia Daily News in December 2011, and the reason why didn't have to wait long: Just a few hours later, several of his family members publicly accused him of molesting them as children. Conlin never denied their accusations and practically disappeared, never writing again before his death in 2014. Controversially, the Baseball Writers' Association of America refused to revoke the coveted J. G. Taylor Spink Award - the closest thing to a Baseball Hall of Fame induction for a journalist - from Conlin, which he just received earlier that year.
• It didn't take long for Goodloe Sutton, the publisher/editor/owner of the Linden, Alabama Democrat-Reporter, to face a firestorm of international condemnation after penning an editorial in February 2019 that called for the Ku Klux Klan to "ride again," and then doubling down by suggesting the Klan's efforts to "clean up D.C." should include lynching. Within a week, the state's press association had censured him and suspended the Democrat-Reporter 's membership in the organization; one day later, Sutton—who had had a history of inflammatory remarks in the paper—stepped down from his publishing and editing duties, which were subsequently filled by Elecia Dexter, an African-American who'd previously served as the paper's front office clerk. Sutton still retained ownership in his paper, however, and Dexter would quit her new job shortly after her promotion—citing yet more interference from Sutton, which brought further scrutiny against him and his paper. Sutton finally sold the Democrat-Reporter and retired on July 1, 2019; at time of writing, he still has not apologized for his comments. The new owner, Tommy Wells, has said that Sutton doesn't even have the keys to the office anymore.
• Future British prime minister Boris Johnson was fired from The Times after making up a quote for an article on Edward II's palace.
• The New York biweekly gay newspaper The New York Native flourished in the early '80s as one of the first news outlets to cover the AIDS epidemic, especially after it published Larry Kramer's seminal 1983 article "1,112 and Counting", a five-thousand-word "The Reason You Suck" Speech castigating politicians, the public health system, and the gay cultural establishment for their response to it. Unfortunately, by the mid-'80s it became a vehicle for editor/publisher Charles Ortleb's conspiracy theories about AIDS, claiming that HIV didn't cause it and that anti-retroviral drugs were useless and harmful while championing various crackpot theories about the disease and its origins. Circulation fell by 60% between 1985 and 1995 as the gay community and organizations (including Kramer's ACT UP) disowned the Native over what they saw as its ignorant response to the epidemic, and it ceased publication in 1997, with Ortleb citing its AIDS coverage as a key reason why.
  • The Native's self-engineered failure also took with it the publisher's small stable of gay and theater periodicals, including Christopher Street, TheaterWeek, and Opera Monthly.
• In 1998, star reporter Michael Gallagher and editor Lawrence Beaupre of The Cincinnati Enquirer were forced to take the fall in the fiasco over Gallagher's series of investigative articles, totaling eighteen pages, on Chiquita. Gallagher had uncovered damning evidence that the banana company had engaged in labor abuses and corruption. The problem was, Gallagher had obtained that information illegally by hacking into Chiquita's records, then lied to his superiors at the Enquirer about his sources. In addition to firing Gallagher (who ended up sentenced to five years probation) and having Beaupre Kicked Upstairs, the Enquirer paid Chiquita $14 million in an out-of-court settlement, destroyed all of the evidence Gallagher had collected, and ran an unprecedented three-day front-page retraction of Gallagher's articles.
• Fiona Moriarty-McLaughlin, a reporter for the Washington Examiner, posed for a social media photo implying she was aiding the cleanup effort after civil unrest in Santa Monica following the George Floyd killing. Witnesses soon came forward with photographic evidence that she came to a vandalized store that was being boarded up, grabbed an actual volunteer's power drill to pose for the photo, got back into her SUV, and drove away. Moriarty-McLaughlin was soon fired from the Examiner.
• Neoconservative Brazilian columnist Rodrigo Constantino was fired from the newspaper O Correio do Povo and the Editora Record (plus from two radio stations) in November 2020 after he commented, in regards to a publicized trial for rape in the country, that if he had a daughter who told him that she was raped, he would ask her for the "circumstances" of it, saying that if it was after she got drunk at a party and passed out, he would punish her severely and not denounce the rapists.
• Laura Italiano resigned from the New York Post after getting caught fabricating a story that Vice President Kamala Harris was giving copies of her children's book to immigrants at the Mexican border. She claimed it was a matter of conscience after her bosses forced her to write the story, but didn't win many over with her refusal to actually name whoever supposedly gave the order, with a lot of them still suspecting she was trying to cover up her own misdeed.
• Irish journalist Eoghan Harris was dropped from the Sunday Independent in May 2021 after it was discovered he had been behind a fake Twitter account called "Barbara J. Pym". Harris had used the account to harass Irish Examiner journalist Aoife Moore for her support of Sinn Féin as well as to praise his own work. Twitter also ended up suspending a further eight accounts linked to Harris.
• Jewish Press editor Elliot Resnik was fired by the paper in 2021 after he was identified as being part of the mob that stormed the Capitol in Washington D.C. earlier that year. Resnik's tenure with the paper had been controversial due to his opinion columns that had been criticized for being homophobic or racist.
• In November 2019, Des Moines Register trending news reporter Aaron Calvin published an article about social media sensation Carson King, who channeled a chance ESPN appearance into a wildly successful fundraiser for a children’s hospital. Calvin included a bit about King's past with posting ill-humored tweets and King's apology for it near the end as "part of a narrative of growth, maturity, and compassion—not an accusatory, 'gotcha' moment." When King lost a deal with the makers of his beer of choice, Busch Light, as a result, supporters of King dug up past tweets by Calvin that contained homophobic and misogynistic language along with quotations of N-Word Privileges-filled Kanye West lyrics, which, along with death threats and hate mail he was receiving, resulted in Calvin being fired. Since then, Calvin has written for a small chain of newspapers in Vermont.
• On April 15, 2023, the German weekly magazine Die Aktuelle ran what its cover called "the first interview" with seven-time Formula 1 racing champion Michael Schumacher after the severe head injuries he had suffered in a skiing accident almost ten years ago—and who had not been seen in public since. There was just one problem: the entire piece, up to and including everything Schumacher "said", had been generated by an artificial intelligence program. The magazine's publisher issued an apology and relieved editor-in-chief Anne Hoffmann of her duties after Schumacher's family announced their intent to take legal action.
• Canadian journalist Jan Wong is best known for "Get under the desk", an article she wrote for The Globe and Mail which linked three school shootings in Quebec to purported alienation brought on by Quebec's linguistic struggle, even going so far as to accuse Quebecois culture of being overly concerned with "racial purity". There was an enormous backlash against Wong's article and her as a person, leading her to be dismissed from the Globe, and her subsequent work has been haunted by the specter of "Get under the desk".

One America News Network (OAN)

• Producer Marty Golingan was fired after he gave an interview to The New York Times denouncing OAN's role in airing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, something which contributed to the atmosphere that led to the Capitol riots in January 2021.
• Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump's former campaign manager, was fired by OAN in August 2017 for making frequent guest appearances at rival TV network Fox News without permission.
• OAN itself is notorious for promoting conspiracy theories (especially Donald Trump's false claim that he won the 2020 election) and its pro-Trump commentary. When it was revealed that telecom conglomerate AT&T (which also owned CNN from 2018 to 2022) had a key role in founding and supporting OAN via its DirecTV unit to compete with Fox News, Trump critics began cancelling their subscriptions in droves. This forced AT&T to announce in January 2022 that they would drop OAN in April, effectively depriving the station of 90% of its revenue, though they still retained their ad deal under a separate contract. Time Warner Cable, Verizon, and Frontier Communications followed suit and dropped OAN later in the year. This sent the network into a tailspin, as a pressure campaign (including a Frivolous Lawsuit, Republican politicians and OAN hosts accusing the cable companies of "cancel culture", and attempts to dox AT&T's board) fizzled out, OAN's CEO Robert Herring personally failed to convince the cable providers to carry his channel, a talent exodus due to poor morale occurred, and the cable companies offered rival networks Fox Nation and Newsmax as alternatives. The cable companies also dropped OAN's sister channel A Wealth of Entertainment (AWE) as well.

Online media

• Alt-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos had his invitation to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) revoked, lost a book deal, and resigned from Breitbart after a video surfaced in 2017 of him appearing to endorse pedophilia. Buzzfeed News leaked later that year that he was a virulent neo-Nazi who falsely claimed to be Jewish to deflect from these accusations and paint liberals as insensitive and prejudiced. One year later, he found himself saddled with $2 million in unpaid debt, lost the sponsorship of the Mercer family and his attempted comeback on Patreon failed with his account getting banned just one day after its creation.
• Freelance writer David Leavitt first garnered the ire of the alt-right when he made a joke about Donald Trump dying. That being said, his career ultimately survived. He would not be so lucky the next time around when he joked about the 2017 Ariana Grande concert bombing in Manchester. Aside from angering the right again, he was quickly disowned by the left, with several organizations he's written for distancing themselves from him. And then, a year later, he obliterated whatever little was left of his career by making another series of insensitive tweets about the suicides of fashion designer Kate Spade and chef Anthony Bourdain. By the next time he courted controversy - a bizarre January 2020 incident in which he went on a Twitter rant about, and called the police on, a Target employee who refused to sell him a toothbrush listed at an inaccurate price, which garnered him universal scorn - he had not been published anywhere but his own website for years.
• Nick Robinson was fired from Polygon in August 2017 after it was revealed he had made unwanted sexual advances toward several female video game journalists. This resulted in the cancellation of Touch the Skyrim and Let's Go to Hell, two offbeat comedy Let's Play series he had been hosting with fellow Polygon writer Griffin McElroy, who also publicly severed his friendship with Robinson. McElroy also opted to end Coolgames Inc, the podcast he and Robinson hosted together, instead of finding a new co-host.
• Harry Knowles, the founder of the website Ain't It Cool News, left the website in September 2017 after five women came forward with accusations of sexual assault, which had led to several longtime contributors leaving the website and an Austin movie theater to cut ties with Ain't It Cool's Butt-Numb-A-Thon film festival. Harry's sister Dannie has run the website since his departure.
• Conservative writer Denise McCallister was fired by both The Federalist and The Daily Wire in March 2019 after she went on a highly homophobic Twitter rant against New York Magazine journalist Yashar Ali that earned her condemnation from both sides of the aisle.
• The conservative website Talon News and its chief correspondent, Jeff Gannon, became the subject of controversy in 2005 when Gannon was allowed a White House pass and asked biased, pro-Bush questions at press briefings. The liberal watchdog Media Matters uncovered Gannon's past as a gay escort and Talon News' status as a propaganda arm for a Republican activist group, GOPUSA, raising doubts about the website's legitimacy and editorial independence. Gannon was quickly stripped of his press pass while Talon News was shut down.
• Ars Technica cut ties with tech journalist Peter Bright after he was arrested on suspicion of soliciting child sex online in June 2019.
• John Solomon was fired from his positions as editorial writer and executive vice-president for digital video for The Hill in September 2019 for helping Rudy Giuliani try to discredit the former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Solomon had already been under fire for creating conspiracy theories, including the one involving Joe Biden and Ukraine. He was sharply condemned by the paper for changing his stories repeatedly, along with using his own legal representatives as sources and not disclosing it. He would later find a new gig as a right-wing commentator on Fox News.
• Not even Sonic the Hedgehog-based news sites are exempt from this. In late May 2020, Tristan Oliver, owner of Sonic and SEGA fansite TSSZ News, began covering the riots and protests that were going on as a result of George Floyd's death on the site's Twitter. After people began complaining and saying that a Sonic-themed site was not an appropriate place to report the matter, Tristan tried to justify it by comparing the riots to events that occurred in the series, namely Sonic being mistaken for Shadow by G.U.N. in Sonic Adventure 2 and the general plot of Sonic Forces. This backfired hard, resulting in backlash against Tristan and one of the site's most popular writers leaving. Tristan would later shut down the site the next day, taking down 21 years of content with it (at least at first, as said content would later be announced to be in the process of archived.)
• Brandon Stroud, who published a Professional Wrestling vertical on the website Uproxx, "With Spandex", was suspended after he was accused of sexual assault as part of the Speaking Out movement in pro wrestling in June 2020. Uproxx later announced on July 2 that Stroud was fired from the publication and "With Spandex" would be shut down, with all future pro wrestling articles going to its sports section.
• The Young Turks:
  • Jordan Chariton was fired from TYT in November 2017 after a HuffPost guest contributor, Christian Chiakulas, accused him of sexually assaulting a subordinate at Chariton's defunct journalistic non-profit group, Truth Against the Machine, and of misappropriating TYT resources to promote said non-profit group. Chariton sued, and eventually settled, with TYT. He also targeted HuffPost in a $23 million libel suit, resulting in a Blog-Ending Misdemeanor when the website removed its entire guest-blogging platform.
  • Jimmy Dore left TYT in 2019, later disclosing that he was forced to resign after sending angry, insulting text messages to TYT contributor Francesca Fiorentini while he was vacationing in Italy. (Fiorentini's crime? Asking Dore, who is an apologist for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, to stop conflating journalists in Syria with al-Qaeda.) Other TYT personalities, namely Ana Kasparian and Emma Vigeland, later accused Dore of being a misogynist who engaged in sexual harassment and abusive workplace practices.
• The Intercept:
  • Juan Thompson was fired from The Intercept in January 2016 after it was discovered that not only had he fabricated several of his stories, but his entire resume with it, as well as impersonating the site's editor-in-chief in emails, and then sending several rambling notes to various media outlets. This was already more than enough to destroy his career, but Thompson kept making fanciful and unhinged statements on social media; in one instance, he terrorized and threatened a St. Louis newspaper reporter for writing stories about what he did. He made headlines again in March 2017, when he was arrested for making threats against Jewish community centers across the country in a convoluted revenge plot against an ex-girlfriend. He was ultimately sentenced to five years in prison for cyberstalking and the bomb hoaxes.
  • Glenn Greenwald suddenly announced in October 2020 that he had resigned from The Intercept, which he had co-founded, over what he claimed was the site's censorship of an article detailing alleged corruption by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter, based on leaks facilitated by foreign hackers and promoted by Donald Trump's re-election campaign. A war of words soon ensued between Greenwald and his former publication, with The Intercept basically stating that Greenwald was laundering political propaganda under the guise of journalism and was throwing a tantrum after refusing to allow his work to be fact-checked.
  • Three months later, Laura Poitras, another Intercept co-founder and the director of the documentary film Citizenfour, was allegedly fired by the website's parent company, First Look Media, over her criticisms of how they mishandled information about government whistleblower Reality Winner, who was arrested after leaking an intelligence report concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election, which led to Winner's imprisonment.
• After the death of pro wrestler Brodie Lee from a lung issue, veteran wrestling journalist Bruce Mitchell of Pro Wrestling Torch posted a column that speculated without evidence that he could've died of COVID-19 (despite Lee's widow specifically stating that it was a non-COVID-19 issue when announcing his death) and accused both his grieving family and All Elite Wrestling of covering up the circumstances of his death. The article received a huge amount of backlash, and was later deleted before Mitchell was fired from Pro Wrestling Torch. Even after Lee's widow expressed her anger at the article and revealed that Lee repeatedly tested negative for COVID-19 in both the tests constantly made at the location AEW tapes their shows and at the hospital, Mitchell's refusal to apologise for or recant the article's claims (even rehosting it on a different website) intensified the backlash and he eventually deleted his Twitter.
• Jake Crosby was an anti-vaccine blogger with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder who is formerly affiliated with Age of Autism, which is arguably the most influential website in the anti-vaxxer community^note AoA began as the "Rescue Post", the official newsletter of Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccine group Generation Rescue. During his time with AoA, Crosby became notorious both for his extreme opinions and for ambushing vaccine advocates in public as part of his attack pieces about them. But his relationship with AoA began to sour in late 2012 after one of the site's editors, Mark Blaxill, who is also the head of an anti-vaccine activist group called SafeMinds, kept Crosby from testifying alongside Blaxill at a congressional hearing on the debunked link between vaccines and autism. Crosby, in a characteristically petty move, started publicly attacking Blaxill and AoA's other editors in his posts and released their private correspondence with himself and with each other, some of which cast AoA in a bad light and quickly became fodder for pro-vaccine bloggers who were watching the feud unfold. In early 2013 he was removed from the site. Crosby languished in the outermost fringes of the anti-vaxxer movement for several years before dropping off the Internet almost completely in 2020.
• In early 2021, Rolling Stone parted ways with left-wing commentators Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper, whose Useful Idiots podcast had been hosted online by the magazine. Taibbi and Halper later confirmed that Rolling Stone had fired them over statements they made, including their denial that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad had committed chemical weapon attacks.
• Deadspin was once Gawker 's website for sports news that sometimes dabbled in politics. Then, in 2019, Deadspin and the rest of Gawker 's website were bought by a private equity firm under the G/O Media banner. Under new CEO Jim Spanfeller, the staff were met with Executive Meddling at every turn. After receiving a memo to "stick to sports," editor-in-chief Barry Petresky filled the front page with political stories in protest. Editorial director Paul Maidment fired Petresky, resulting in the entire staff leaving and starting their own site, Defector Media, in September 2020. As for Deadspin, the site went on hiatus for three months while new staff members were hired. Maidment retired not long after.
• In September 2020, Virgil Texas of Chapo Trap House fame launched a new podcast, Bad Faith, with former Bernie Sanders spokeswoman Briahna Joy Gray. Ten months later, in June 2021, an anonymous Twitter user came forward accusing Texas of sexually grooming her through online correspondence when she was underage. Texas abruptly became absent from subsequent episodes of Bad Faith (and stopped updating his Twitter page), with Gray not addressing the allegations until several weeks later, in a vaguely worded message exclusively sent to the podcast's Patreon subscribers which contained no real information on whether he would return. By mid-September, Gray had removed Texas's likeness from most promotional material for Bad Faith, all but confirming that he was given the boot.
• Sheraz Farooqi, a contributor for the Forbes website, was abruptly fired from the site after publishing an article that accused Joss Whedon (who was already being accused of other abuses) and Geoff Johns of intentionally firing almost all the non-white actors from Justice League (2017) and ordering one black actor's skin to be digitally lightened. Farooqi's only source for these allegations was actor Ray Fisher, who offered no evidence for any of these claims, and in fact claimed that he'd only heard of them through other sources, and thus the article was swiftly edited after a representative for Whedon announced that they were exploring their legal options.
• Elijah Schaffer was a young rising right-wing personality and Glenn Beck's protégé who worked with him and had his own show at Beck's news network, The Blaze, until he was fired from the network in September 2022 over allegations of getting drunk and sexually assaulting a co-worker during a film's premiere.
• James O'Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, an alt-right outfit known for its edited undercover videos aimed to discredit mainstream media figures and progressive groups, was fired by Project Veritas's board in February 2023 amid accusations of embezzlement and his poor treatment of employees. O'Keefe's free-wheeling nearly bankrupted Project Veritas and caused it to suspend operations indefinitely by laying off most of its employees in September 2023. Financial problems also forced interim CEO Hannah Giles to resign in December 2023.
• Axios fired reporter Ben Montgomery in March 2023 after he called a recent press release by Florida governor Ron DeSantis on critical race theory (CRT) "propaganda" in an email.
• Candace Owens, a right-wing political commentator for The Daily Wire, resigned in March 2024 after months of feuding with her fellow hosts (in particular Ben Shapiro) over her embrace of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories amidst the ongoing 2023 Israel-Hamas war.

PBS

• Louis Rukeyser, the host of the long-running PBS business show Wall Street Week, was fired by Maryland Public Television in 2002 for an on-air editorial in which he criticized the station for pressuring him to retire over his age and urged viewers to ask PBS to produce a new program he was creating instead. He ended up hosting Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street for CNBC, while Wall Street Week was ultimately cancelled without Rukeyser. Unfortunately, Rukeyser's new show didn't last any longer due to his illness (and death) from multiple myeloma in 2006.

Serial offenders

Arnett, Peter

• Longtime war correspondent Peter Arnett, who had previously won a Pulitzer in 1966 for his coverage of The Vietnam War, presented a 1998 documentary on CNN NewsStand called "Valley of Death" which claimed that the United States Army had used nerve gas on a group of deserting U.S. soldiers in Laos in 1970. When the Pentagon commissioned a report that concluded that such a war crime never happened, CNN conducted its own investigation and found that the documentary had been "flawed" and merited a retraction. Several producers were fired or forced to resign over the documentary. Arnett was reprimanded and left the network the following year due to "lingering fallout" from the incident, but this wouldn't be his last run-in with career-altering controversy.
• Arnett landed at NBC just before the initial 2003 invasion of Iraq and reported from Baghdad during the "shock and awe" bombing campaign. However, this gig ended when Arnett (acting out of what he and NBC thought was professional courtesy) gave an interview to Iraq's State Broadcaster and gave an unflattering appraisal of how the war was unfolding for the U.S. The interview was predictably met with an outcry by Americans who felt that Arnett was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. While they initially defended Arnett, NBC (along with MSNBC and National Geographic) was soon forced to cut ties with him. From here, Arnett moved on to the (anti-war) British tabloid The Daily Mirror.

Bashir, Martin

• Martin Bashir, a British journalist who made a name for himself with his in-depth interviews of Princess Diana and Michael Jackson, joined ABC in 2005 as one of three rotating co-hosts for Nightline. ABC suspended him in 2008 over a speech he made at an Asian American Journalists Association dinner in which he stated he was "happy that the podium covers me from the waist down" in the presence of "Asian babes", and quipped that a dress worn by his colleague Juju Chang was "long enough to cover the important parts and short enough to keep your interest." Bashir wrote an apology and left ABC in 2010.
• Bashir next went to MSNBC, where he hosted an eponymous weekday political show. In November 2013, Bashir criticized former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin for comparing the federal debt to slavery. Referencing a punishment used by slaveowner Thomas Thistlewood called "Derby's dose" — where a slave would be forced to defecate or urinate into the mouth of another slave — Bashir stated that Palin would be "truly qualified" and an "outstanding candidate" for that very punishment. He was suspended by the network and resigned two days later.
• In late 2016, Bashir returned to his original employer, the BBC, as the corporation's new religion and ethics correspondent. But in 2020 allegations were put forward that Bashir had used forged bank documents to manipulate Princess Diana and her brother, Earl Spencer, into granting him Diana's 1995 Panorama interview, and that BBC bosses had known about and covered up Bashir's duplicitous behavior.^note Making things worse was that the forgeries in question falsely implicated members of Diana's security detail in leaking stories to the tabloids for money. While the documents gave Diana an impetus to tell her side of the story, it also fed her paranoia and resulted in the loss of her security detail, which became a factor in her death two years later. For this reason, several observers — including Earl Spencer and Prince Harry — drew a link between Bashir's actions and Diana's demise. Bashir resigned from the BBC for purported health-related issues in May 2021, days before an independent inquiry set up by the BBC confirmed the allegations and quite possibly ended his career for good.

Bolling, Eric

• Long-time Fox News personality Eric Bolling, a co-host on The Five and Fox News Specialists, was suspended pending investigation in early August 2017 following allegations that he'd sent lewd photographs to several female coworkers. Fox parted ways with Bolling one month later, and Fox News Specialists was cancelled.
• Bolling ended up hosting a syndicated program, America This Week, for the similarly right-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group. During the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020, Bolling used his show to platform outrageous conspiracy theories about the virus, including one episode — which Sinclair was forced to pull off the air — which included an allegation that Dr. Anthony Fauci (a member of President Trump's COVID response team who had become a hate figure among conservatives for publicly contradicting Trump's statements about how the pandemic should be dealt with) had manufactured the virus and engineered its spread. Sinclair announced in 2021 that it would be cancelling America This Week — a move many observers linked to Bolling's pandemic coverage — after which Bolling switched to Newsmax TV.

Domenech, Ben

• In early 2006, conservative commentator Ben Domenech was hired by The Washington Post to write a conservative-leaning blog on their website called "Red America". Domenech had been on the job for just three days before he was accused of plagiarizing from several sources, including WaPo itself, which led to even other like-minded conservative pundits calling for his ouster. Domenech immediately resigned, having written just six posts in his brief career with WaPo.
• Domenech's career continued, and his pieces ended up in online publications like The Huffington Post and the Washington Examiner. However, in 2013, it was revealed that Domenech had taken $36,000 from fellow commentator Joshua Trevino in exchange for writing positive pieces about the repressive Malaysian government and didn't divulge this transaction to his readers (Trevino himself had lost his column in The Guardian for failing to disclose his ties to Malaysia a couple of years prior). Despite Domenech denying any wrongdoing, HuffPo and the Examiner removed his work from their platforms.
• The same year that the Malaysia scandal broke, Domenech co-founded the right-wing commentary site The Federalist, which became a font for medical disinformation, including in pieces written by Domenech, during the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020. Twitter briefly suspended the website's account over a post that explicitly endorsed "pox party"-style mass gatherings to drive up herd immunity, against the recommendations of medical experts.

Logan, Lara

• Lara Logan, at one point considered a rising star for her work as a foreign correspondent, took a leave of absence from CBS News after presenting a report on 60 Minutes which implicated members of the Obama Administration in criminal wrongdoing in relation to the 2012 attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi. Logan was forced to publicly apologize when it turned out that her only source for the story lied about his background and about his whereabouts on the day of the attack. Logan continued on with CBS for several more years until 2018, when she found a new gig as a right-wing commentator on Fox News's streaming service, Fox Nation.
• In late 2021, Logan found herself in another controversy when she made comments on Fox News comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden's chief medical advisor, to Nazi eugenicist/war criminal Josef Mengele, and doubled down on the comparison in the face of massive backlash. It wasn't long before Logan disappeared from Fox's airwaves, with no word from the network on whether she'd be fired. She was also dropped by her talent agency. In March 2022, Logan confirmed that Fox did indeed fire her.
• Logan next made regular appearances on Fox's far-right competitor, Newsmax, where she was a regular guest on the aforementioned Eric Bolling's primetime show. During one such appearance in October 2022, Logan launched into a rant in which she claimed that a "global cabal" (generally understood as an anti-Semitic euphemism) was plotting to "dilute" America's "pool of patriots" by letting in millions of illegal immigrants while linking the so-called "Great Replacement" (a racist conspiracy theory that liberals seek to "replace" white voters with non-white immigrants) to Satan. Shortly after the broadcast, Newsmax announced that it would not allow Logan to appear on their network again.

Morgan, Piers

• In his native Britain, Piers Morgan was fired as editor of the Daily Mirror in 2004 after giving the okay to print a series of photos apparently implicating a British Army unit in Iraqi prisoner abuse. Within days these were proven to be fakes and he left in shame. Interestingly, for a time most of the British public either forgot this incident or chose to ignore it as, after a stint in the U.S. (see below), he became a relatively successful television personality as co-host of Good Morning Britain, despite the fact that you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't despise him.^note For example, on an episode of Argumental, Rufus Hound was failing to convince the audience that Jeremy Clarkson was a hero until he remembered that "this man punched Piers Morgan three times." The audience cheered. One possible explanation is that his first TV job after the incident was on Britain's Got Talent alongside Simon Cowell, where he could easily manipulate audiences to think of him as the nicer judge to Simon's judgmental bastard. (Although it's debatable as to whether he took on the role of the "Evil Judge". Either way, the position on the show somehow worked for him.) However, this stint ended in 2021 after Morgan accused Meghan Markle of fabricating her claim, made during a US interview with Oprah Winfrey, that her mistreatment at the hands of The British Royal Family led to her having suicidal thoughts. On the following day's Good Morning Britain, Morgan stormed off the set after co-host Alex Beresford called him out for his comments; he was immediately let go and his comments became subject to an investigation by the UK media regulator Ofcom. Morgan eventually landed a primetime show on both Fox News' streaming channel Fox Nation and the British news channel TalkTV the following year.
• Across the pond, Morgan's evening weekday talk show on CNN had a controversy in 2014 over misgendering transgender activist Janet Mock, followed by several disparaging tweets about her from Morgan. The show was soon cancelled and replaced with documentaries.

Olbermann, Keith

• The first of Keith Olbermann's many run-ins with this trope came when he was still a co-anchor for ESPN's SportsCenter. In 1997, Olbermann appeared as a guest on The Daily Show (back when he was hosted by Craig Kilborn) without the permission of his bosses at ESPN, and when he was asked (as part of the now-defunct "Five Questions" segment) what "the most godforsaken place on the East Coast" was, Olbermann replied, "Bristol, Connecticut" — the home of ESPN's headquarters. The incident resulted in Olbermann being slapped with a two-week suspension and was a contributing factor to his departure from ESPN later in the year.
• Olbermann's first foray into newscasting for MSNBC soon afterward, during which he hosted a prime-time program called The Big Show, ended when he publicly made fun of what he felt was the network's gratuitous coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal in a college commencement address.
• Olbermann was rehired by MSNBC a few years later in 2003 and found success with Countdown With Keith Olbermann, but found himself being suspended in 2010 after he made donations to three Democratic congressional candidates during the mid-term campaign, purportedly violating an MSNBC policy barring personalities from doing so. Olbermann's liberal fans successfully pressured MSNBC into ending his suspension early, but his relations with network execs worsened and ended with his abrupt firing mid-broadcast in January 2011.
• After his second firing from MSNBC, Olbermann re-launched Countdown on the progressive network Current TV. However, the new Countdown devolved into a Troubled Production, with Olbermann not helping matters with his absenteeism and reportedly abusive behavior. He was fired by Current TV in less than a year.

Rushmore, Howard

The New York Daily News once said of columnist Howard Rushmore that he "didn't merely burn bridges when he left a job. He blew them up." It would not be a stretch to say Rushmore's entire career was one Role-Ending Misdemeanor after another, and on both ends of the trope as well:

• It started when Rushmore was expelled from high school for penning exposés that teachers and staff deemed defamatory to them and the administration. Later, he became a film critic for the Communist Party-aligned Daily Worker; they would boot him from the publication in 1939 for—of all things—a review of Gone with the Wind that they thought wasn't negative enough.^note Rushmore held to the party’s belief that the film was racist, and described the film as a "magnificent bore", though he did like its technical aspects The dismissal, however, blew up in The Daily Worker's face and ironically made Rushmore an overnight celebrity in anti-communist circles.
• In 1947, Rushmore, now himself an anti-communist, was a key witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee while writing for the New York Journal-American. He used the opportunity to expose one person after another, known or unknown, as a potential communist, and went so far as boasting that he'd caused one such target—a 40-year-old widowed Russian-American schoolteacher—to take her own life after naming her and causing the school board to fire her. Even though most of the exposés he wrote were highly exaggerated, Rushmore didn't care—he was getting more (in)famous by the day, and by 1949 he was dining in the ritzy Stork Club's inner sanctum with the likes of infamous lawyer Roy Cohn and author William F. Buckley, the latter whom would later found the conservative National Review.
• Then Rushmore's fortunes took a turn for the worse; in 1953, he worked under Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was chairing a televised investigation related to his "Red Scare". But before that investigation was through, Rushmore abruptly resigned from his post and returned to the JA; as director of research, he'd funneled all testimonies through his office, in the hope of using them as raw material for his future articles, which nearly sabotaged the proceedings. Cohn, as chief counsel, responded by withholding all information from Rushmore unless it went through him first, despite being well within his rights to file felony charges against the man for intent to leak evidence. An outraged Rushmore quit in protest, only to be fired from the JA anyway soon after criticizing Cohn in print.
• He then migrated to the gossip magazine Confidential, where an old friend had secured him a position as chief editor under publisher Robert Harrison, whose network of informants in Hollywood led Rushmore to use the magazine to expose yet more supporters of communism. Then, in 1955, Rushmore claimed on air in Chicago that the leader of the city's Communist Party was in hiding; shortly after that, Rushmore disappeared amidst a cloud of speculation that he'd been kidnapped or even murdered, only to resurface in a Montana hotel under a pseudonym, while the party leader he'd identified was actually living, quite visibly, in Manhattan. An embarrassed Rushmore ultimately quit Confidential in 1956 after Harrison refused to print his story about Eleanor Roosevelt's alleged interracial affair.
• By now, his tailspin was terminal; Rushmore was an alcoholic and addicted to amphetamines, and his second wife Frances was admitted to hospital after attempting suicide the previous September. But in a final act of retaliation, he made use of his severance pay from Confidential to put Harrison's niece and his network on trial in 1957—with him as the lead witness. Though a mistrial was declared, the case was later retried, and a rattled Harrison, to spare his niece from the stress of the first trial, promised to publish only positive stories in Confidential from there on out—a deal which effectively ended the publication; it was sold off in 1958 amid plummeting readership, toned down further still, and finally shut down after Harrison's death twenty years later.
• But Rushmore had left so much scorched earth in his wake that it inevitably burned him too; already a pariah in the publishing world, he was reduced to writing occasional articles in hunting magazines. On top of that, he was now under psychiatric care, and Frances had moved out of the house with their stepdaughter on advice from her own psychiatrist. A final attempt at reconciliation between husband and wife went horribly wrong: on January 3, 1958, Rushmore fatally shot Frances and then himself in the head, ending his own career more explosively than he had many others.

Starnes, Todd

• Starnes started out as a staff writer on the Baptist Press, the official news wire of the Southern Baptist Convention, until 2003. He had published a piece on the US Secretary of Education Ron Paige claiming he told him that he “would prefer to have a child in a school that has a strong appreciation for the values of the Christian community, where a child is taught to have a strong faith”, causing massive backlash to the point Paige nearly lost his job. It was later discovered, through interview tapes, that Starnes had misquoted Paige to make it seem like he supported promoting Christian values in public schools, causing the Baptist Press to give him the boot.
• After spending fourteen years with Fox News as a columnist and radio personality, Starnes found himself fired again in 2019 after he stated on his radio program that Democrats "do not worship a Christian God" and suggested they worship the Pagan god Moloch, who is often associated with child sacrifice, though a Fox spokesman told The Wrap that his departure was "well in the works" before then.

In General

• Kimmo Wilska, an English-language newscaster for the Finnish station Yle, was fired after pretending to drink beer following an alcohol-related story. His bosses were not amused.
• Upon hearing that CBS reporter Lara Logan (see above) had been assaulted while covering the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt in 2011, Arab-American journalist Nir Rosen mockingly tweeted that Logan — who he called a "major war monger" — was "going to become a martyr and glorified", and joked that "it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson [Cooper] too". This immediately ignited outrage given that Logan's assault had been a 25-minute gang rape, which Rosen claimed to have been unaware of when he sent the tweet. Rosen issued an apology and resigned as a senior fellow at NYU's Center for Law and Security.
• In 2012, commentator John Derbyshire was fired by the conservative magazine National Review after penning a column for the far-right Taki's Magazine about the purported dangers black people pose to whites. Derbyshire subsequently joined the white nationalist website VDARE and became a figure in the alt-right movement.
• Petra László, a reporter for the Right-leaning Hungarian news station N1TV, was fired from her job after she appeared in a video purposely tripping a fleeing refugee and another in which she kicks a couple of refugees (one of them a young girl), during the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis in Europe.
• Fabrication and plagiarism are considered to be major breaches of journalistic ethics and are often career killers for journalists who are caught committing them. Among the best-known cases:
  • Stephen Glass, a star reporter at The New Republic whose work, notably the feature "Hack Heaven" about a 15-year old jet-setting hacker, was discovered to be largely fabrication in 1998. His story was made into the film Shattered Glass, and while he wrote a lightly fictionalized novel about his experience, that has been all he's written since. Glass had considerable remorse for what he did, notably repaying over $200,000 of what he had earned to TNR and other publications he had written for without them asking him to do so. He now sometimes speaks to college journalism ethics classes about his scandal and his life. Glass returned to prominence in late 2021, after a journalism newsletter published a widely-shared story about his late wife's battle with early onset Alzheimer's disease.
  • Ruth Shalit, another rising star at TNR, was fired by the publication in 1999 after multiple instances of plagiarism in her work were uncovered; there were also instances where subjects of articles alleged she had made things up. After the same problems began cropping up in later positions writing about the ad industry when she took a job there, she was fired from that position and did not write anything for a while. In 2020, 25 years after her ouster from TNR, Shalit ended up at The Atlantic and wrote a story (about parents pushing their children into niche sports) that mentioned a child who had been completely fabricated. The Atlantic soon retracted the story and fired Shalit, issuing an 800-word correction which denounced her in no uncertain terms.
  • Janet Cooke of The Washington Post became the only journalist to ever return a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 after it was discovered that her story "Jimmy's World", about an 8-year-old heroin addict, was a fabrication. She has never worked in journalism again.
  • Michael Finkel of The New York Times, was fired in 2002 for creating a composite character in a story on modern-day African slavery. Interestingly, shortly after he was fired, he came into contact with convicted murderer Christian Longo, who had used Finkel's name as an alias while on the run - ironically, because he was certain Finkel would tell his "real story." The result? Finkel turned both his dismissal from the Times and his interviews with Longo into the non-fiction book True Story, which was later made into a film. Following the success of the book, he became one of only a few journalists to be fired for fabrication to successfully rebuild their career, winning the Edgar Award for true crime writing.
  • Jayson Blair, a fast-rising writer and editor for The New York Times, was fired in 2003 after several instances of plagiarism and fabrication came to light, which deeply embarrassed the paper. The Blair scandal also cost Pulitzer Prize-winning Times executive editor Howell Raines his job. Raines eventually rebounded with a new career as a media columnist, while Blair never worked in journalism again.
  • Gerd Heidemann was an investigative journalist for Germany's left-leaning magazine Stern, who was also an obsessive collector of Nazi memorabilia. This hobby brought Heidemann into contact with Konrad Kujau, who claimed to be in possession of Adolf Hitler's lost diaries. With Heidemann's help, Kujau sold the diaries to Stern in 1983, with historians initially vouching for the diaries' authenticity and serialization deals being made with Rupert Murdoch's newspapers. However, evidence started to accumulate that the diaries had actually been forged by Kujau,^note the most damning being when it was discovered that the initials purportedly reading "AH" on the diary covers, actually read "FH" as a result of Kujau being mistaken of the Engravers Old English font used on them (here's the comparison), with Heidemann knowing about the scheme but pushing for publication of the "diaries" anyway in pursuit of a scoop.^note Heidemann had shown one of the diaries to one of his ex-Nazi acquaintances, former SS General Wilhelm Mohnke, who told him point-blank that the diary was inaccurate; Heidemann chose not to listen. Heidemann was also defrauding Stern and Kujau by pocketing money promised to Kujau as a commission. By 1985, the forgeries were exposed, and both Heidemann and Kujau were arrested and imprisoned for fraud. Kujau died of cancer in 2000, while Heidemann has been living in poverty as of 2013—and it would take another decade for Stern to recover its reputation as a serious news magazine in the wake of the fiasco.
  • Benny Johnson, one of BuzzFeed's most visible writers, was fired from the site in 2014 after two "Weird Twitter" users pointed out several instances of plagiarism on his part.
  • As with Benny Johnson, Ryan Broderick was sacked by BuzzFeed for fabricating his sources in 2020.
  • Johan Hari, the youngest Orwell Prize winner, had to return the prize and leave the Independent newspaper when it was discovered that he had a habit of replacing what people had said to him in interviews with unattributed quotes from other sources, and plagiarised much of one article from Der Spiegel. He wasn't helped by the fact that one "David R from meth productions", who had made damaging edits to Hari's critics' Wikipedia articles, and glowing edits to Hari's own, turned out to be Hari himself.
  • Jonah Lehrer, a science writer, was found to have fabricated several Bob Dylan quotes in his book, Imagine: How Creativity Works as well as several instances of Self-Plagiarism on his blog. The book was taken out of print and he was fired from Wired magazine and The New Yorker.
  • Peter Yeung was fired from The Times of London when editors discovered he had sneaked fabricated travel and concert reviews onto their website in order to receive free tickets and hotel rooms.
  • Filip Miucin was fired from IGN in August 2018 after a video review he did of the PC game Dead Cells was discovered to contain plagiarism from the Youtube channel Boomstick Gaming. IGN began to scrub him from the site completely after even more plagiarism was found soon after. He finally acknowledged his accusations in April 2019 and promised to only make original content from now on, but so far no publication is willing to hire him.
  • Colin Covert, the film critic for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, resigned from the paper in December 2018 after it was revealed he had plagiarized the work of other writers in his reviews of Can You Ever Forgive Me?,^note A film about fraudulent writing, ironically enough Call Me by Your Name and Halloween (2018).
  • Claas Relotius, an award-winning German reporter, was fired by Der Spiegel in late 2018 when it was uncovered that he had fabricated almost all of his famous profile stories. Relotius' firing was a major international story, owing both to the reporter's fame in Europe and the extent of his fabrication and deception. Der Spiegel also filed a criminal complaint against Relotius after it was discovered he asked his readers to donate to a fund for two Syrian orphans he had written about, but who didn't actually exist.
  • Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle was forced to resign from the paper in 1998 after it was discovered he had plagiarized several one-liners from George Carlin's book Brain Droppings. Barnicle initially denied ever reading the book and was initially only suspended from the paper, but the paper's editor asked for his resignation when it was discovered soon after that he had recommended Brain Droppings on local television earlier in the year.
  • Brent DiCrescenzo was one of the first popular critics for music review site Pitchfork, known for his offbeat writing style that often used first-person narratives or flights of fancy to convey his thoughts about an album. His infamous 2000 review of Radiohead's Kid A helped raise the profile of the site in its early years. However, DiCrescenzo's time with Pitchfork abruptly ended in 2004, after he spent much of his review of the Beastie Boys' To the 5 Boroughs detailing a series of purported disagreements he had with the public relations firm that represented both the Beastie Boys and Radiohead. The next week, Pitchfork issued a retraction of the piece when the site confirmed DiCrescenzo had fabricated that part of the review. He never wrote for the website again.
  • Kate Bartels, a junior lifestyle reporter for the Australian real estate marketing portal Domain, was sacked in September 2020 after being caught fabricating stories, quotes, and interviews.
  • USA Today reporter Gabriela Miranda quit in June 2022 after it was revealed that she used fabricated sources on 23 news articles. Miranda also scrubbed her LinkedIn profile as a result.
• The Atlantic sacked writer Kevin Williamson^note NOT the same Kevin Williamson who wrote Scream (1996) and created Dawson's Creek in April 2018, just under a month after hiring him, after uncovering a 2014 podcast in which he had advocated for execution via hanging in abortion cases. They had already been aware of Williamson's views on the matter when they hired him, but the "callous and violent" language they described him as using in the podcast left them with no choice.
• Jamie Allman was removed by Sinclair Broadcasting Group, and his show cancelled after he threatened Parkland massacre survivor David Hogg on Twitter.
• In 1998, British physician Andrew Wakefield authored an infamously fraudulent research paper for The Lancet^note In a nutshell, Wakefield claimed to have made a correlation between vaccines and autism that no other researcher could confirm or reproduce, who would fully retract the story in 2010 following numerous allegations of misconduct, financial conflicts of interest, and unnecessarily invasive procedures on Wakefield's part. He was struck off the UK register a few months later, thus banning him from practicing medicine in the country ever again; nevertheless, Wakefield would turn his theories into a political cause, and his paper would prove to be the catalyst for the modern anti-vaxxer movement.
• In the mid-seventies, the head editor at Car and Driver changed and the new one informed longtime writer Brock Yates that he wasn't pleased with Yates' highly illegal road race, the Cannonball.^note Full name: The Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. He informed Yates that he would be fired if he ran another Cannonball. A couple of years later, Yates colluded with Smokey and the Bandit director Hal Needham about making a film based on the Cannonball. (The end result being The Cannonball Run.) Yates ran another Cannonball for inspiration (he was the screenwriter) and accepted his termination without argument. He was reinstated a few years later and stayed with the magazine until the mid-oughties.
• In 2018, during the country's presidential race, Mexican journalist Ricardo Alemán retweeted a post saying that, just like John Lennon and Selena had been murdered by "fans", a "fan" should do the same to candidate (and eventual election winner) Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Although Alemán deleted the retweet and apologized, Obrador's network of social media supporters made sure the outcry spread fast and Alemán was fired from Televisa and the "24 Horas" newspaper. He has since started his own news website, "La otra opinión", and continues to be a fierce critic of Obrador's policies.
• In October 2020, in response to a tweet by President Trump criticizing him as a "never Trumper", C-SPAN political editor and prospective debate moderator Steve Scully made a tweet addressing Trump-staffer-turned-critic Anthony Scaramucci which asked whether he should respond. When people raised questions about Scully's objectivity (given that C-SPAN hosts and debate mods are supposed to be completely neutral), Scully claimed that his Twitter account had been hacked. Scully eventually admitted that he had lied about being hacked, which led to C-SPAN suspending him indefinitely.^note The debate Scully would have moderated had by that time already been cancelled in relation to the COVID-19 Pandemic Ironically, this came after years of him being heralded as "the most patient man on television" by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Scully returned to C-SPAN in January 2021 as an off-camera producer, but the gig was brief and Scully left the network for good six months later.
• Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker was suspended, and later fired, in October 2020 for masturbating during a Zoom call with co-workers without realizing his webcam was still on. He was also suspended by CNN but eventually began reappearing on the network in June 2021.
• Film blogger Devin Faraci resigned from his position as editor-in-chief of Birth.Movies.Death in October 2016, after being accused of sexual assault by several women.
• Ian Murray, the head of the Society of Editors in the UK, was forced to resign from his post after a disastrous interview with BBC personality Victoria Derbyshire in which he denied that racism in the British tabloid press had played a role in Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's decision to distance themselves from The British Royal Family, then angrily doubled down on his denial when Derbyshire confronted him with a racist tabloid headline about the couple^note specifically a headline from the Daily Star asking whether Harry was about to "marry into gangster royalty" indicating it had.
• Alexi McCammond resigned as editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue just a month after being hired for the job after the uncovering of tweets she posted a decade earlier containing homophobic slurs and of which she mocked Asian people. She apologized for the offensive tweets afterwards, but Teen Vogue lost a major sponsor when Ulta Beauty suspended their advertising deal. A few weeks later, McCammond was replaced by Danielle Kwateng.
• Arizona journalist Emily Wilder was fired by the Associated Press in May 2021, two weeks after being hired by the wire agency. Her firing came after the College Republicans group at Stanford University became upset with her pro-Palestinian activism and as a result spread tweets made while she was a student (some of which she later admitted went too far, for example calling Republican donor Sheldon Adelson a "naked mole rat"), and their tweets about her were then shared by other right-wing personalities. Wilder was initially told that she would not be fired for her tweets, but the AP changed their mind soon after. Wilder's firing proved to be contentious in the journalism world, particularly over social media policies at news agencies, how journalists should discuss and report on the Arab–Israeli Conflict, journalistic objectivity, and a variety of other reasons.
• James May was fired from Autocar magazine for putting subliminal messages in issues as a prank.
• In August 2021, five former staffers for the bimonthly socialist magazine Current Affairs accused founder and editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson of firing most of the magazine's workforce for attempting to start a worker co-op — this after Robinson had publicly called out other purportedly progressive companies for doing that same thing. It was soon announced that Current Affairs would be taking a "short hiatus".
• Eva Herman was a popular German TV presenter who hosted the news program Tagesschau on German TV station ARD from 1989 until 2007 when she wrote a book praising the family policy and traditional gender roles of the Nazis, the culmination of a year-long shift in her political views towards far-right anti-feminism. That quickly got her fired, and since then, she's mainly been known for being a Conspiracy Theorist, including fringe views such as a belief that the 9/11 attacks were staged, that Global Warming is a hoax, and that "powerful Jewish people in the finance sector" were responsible for the migrant crisis of the 2010s.
• Russia Today (now known as RT) is a television network funded by the Russian government that as such has regularly been described as a major Propaganda Machine for it, and is known for giving airtime to conspiracy theories. Despite this, RT was tolerated by much of the world since it didn't quite count as a Tokyo Rose yet and built a devoted following among Western populists and fringe political activists who saw it as The Moral Substitute to a mainstream media they felt was dominated by Western corporate and foreign policy interests. That all changed following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which resulted in highly punitive sanctions against Russia, igniting a mass meltdown of its economy even worse than the one in 1998. RT's mobile apps were removed from app stores, its social media and YouTube accounts were scrubbed, the channel was booted off the air throughout the West due to decisions made by governments and private cable carriers, and its website was defaced by the hacktivist collective Anonymous. RT was forced to shutter its European and American operations and lay off most of its staff in those areas as a result. Previously, RT was banned in Ukraine in 2014 after Russia's annexation of Crimea, with Latvia and Lithuania implementing similar bans in 2020.
  • Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor for the domestic State Broadcaster Channel One, was detained by police and questioned for fourteen hours without legal representation after she stormed the set of the nightly newscast Vremya on-air and held up a sign reading, "Stop the war; don't believe propaganda; they're lying to you" and chanting, "Stop the war!", both in reference to the Ukraine invasion. Ovsyannikova, who is partly of Ukrainian descent, previously posted a video on social media expressing regret for contributing to Channel One's pro-Kremlin messaging. She has been fined 30,000 rubles ($280) and faces up to fifteen years in prison under a recently passed Russian law targeting anti-war dissent. Ovsyannikova was soon hired by the German newspaper Die Welt.
• Investigative reporter James LaPorta was fired by the Associated Press in November 2022 for erroneously reporting a story that Russian-fired missiles crossed into Poland amid the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War when it was Ukraine that accidentally fired the rockets to fend off a barrage of missiles fired by Russia.
• Adnan Hajj, a freelance photographer from Lebanon, was fired by Reuters in 2006 after he admitted photoshopping images related to the Lebanon War to make the damage appear worse than they look. Reuters later scrubbed all images taken by Hajj from its website as a result and fired a photo editor in 2007 for failing to supervise Hajj properly.
• Rachid M'Barki, a senior journalist for the French news channel BFM, was removed from his duties as an overnight presenter for running reports on various subjects that turned out to have been planted by Team Jorge, an Israeli "news for hire" disinformation outfit. M'Barki denied being paid by Team Jorge to run the items but did admit to bypassing BFM's editorial checks to air them.
• Maryanne Demasi is an Australian journalist formerly known for her controversial reports on The ABC's science program Catalyst, which often promoted unfounded claims — most notoriously that cholesterol and saturated fats do not contribute to heart disease — and were accused of bias by scientific experts as well as the ABC program Media Watch. Following a 2016 report in which Demiasi attempted to link microwave radiation from WiFi to negative health effects, the ABC sacked her, issued an on-air apology, and removed the report from its website. Since then she has written articles for the U.S.-based Brownstone Institute, a far-right anti-vax organization.

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