Doug McKelway retires from Fox News with an eyebrow-raising video: ‘I want to thank Roger Ailes’

“I want to thank Roger Ailes,” McKelway says. “Yes, I’m going to repeat that. I want to thank Roger Ailes. Much maligned, generally through errors of omission in reporting by people who had it out for him.” (Ailes resigned under pressure in July 2016 after being accused of sexual harassment by several female employees and died 10 months later.)

After describing the television news business as a visual medium in which physical appearance is important, McKelway offers his advice for “young people” who are entering the industry. “You make a deal with the devil when you work in television news. You make a Faustian bargain,” he says. “You got hired in part because of your looks, and that’s the Faustian bargain. Over time, you start to age. You don’t look as well as you did. And there’s another young crop of young, good-looking, talented people who are making their own Faustian bargain.”

McKelway continues: “When that day comes for you to leave, a piece of advice: Don’t leave embittered. Don’t leave feeling like a victim. Leave with your head held high, and with graciousness, with grace.”

With the Capitol dome behind him, McKelway goes on to swig from a bottle of Pol Roger, “Winston Churchill’s favorite champagne,” and toast himself with one of the British prime minister’s aphorisms: “To victory, I deserve it.”

One Fox News colleague described the video as “bizarre.” Another, upon seeing it, said in a text to The Washington Post, “Um … WOW!”

McKelway did not respond to requests for comment on multiple platforms; his wife, Washington Examiner correspondent Susan Ferrechio, seen briefly on the video, replied via email to ask what the story was about but did not comment. Representatives for Fox News also did not comment on McKelway’s departure.

McKelway joined Fox in 2010 after a long career in local news — most recently at Washington’s WJLA, where he had been dismissed earlier that year after a shouting match with the station’s general manager over his coverage of an environmental protest.

His tenure at Fox was not without controversy. In April 2019, he drew the ire of a colleague after using another quote often attributed to Churchill — “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on” — to suggest in an internal email that President Trump was being unfairly maligned for saying in 2017 that there were “very fine people on both sides” of protests that drew neo-Nazis to Charlottesville. “Your posts read like something you’d read on a White Supremacist chat room,” Jon Decker, a White House correspondent for Fox News Radio, retorted in a leaked email, demanding an apology from McKelway.

Later, McKelway deleted his Twitter account after receiving criticism for some of his posts, as chronicled by advocacy group Media Matters for America, including a February 2019 tweet in which he called Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) a “freak show.”

On his Facebook account, McKelway frequently shares Twitter commentary from Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter who has been skeptical about the danger presented by the coronavirus. In threads about the response to the virus, McKelway wrote that “one could make a strong case we are in the midst of a widespread hysteria.”