Geraldo Rivera, the swashbuckling broadcast journalist and TV personality, denied on Monday a new book's claims that Fox News head Roger Ailes ordered Rivera's microphone be cut in September 2012 during a televised debate on the Obama administration's handling of an attack on the US diplomatic missioni in Benghazi. In journalist Jonathan Alter's new book "The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies", Alter writes that during Fox News' coverage of the attack - which killed four Americans, including US Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens - Ailes watched a heated argument between Rivera and a morning show co-host for several minutes before calling the control room and telling the producers to cut Rivera's mic.
The decision, according to the book, was a consequence of Geraldo Rivera's defense of the Obama administration as the three co-hosts of the morning show "Fox & Friends" criticized the president for failing to save the four Americans who died in the attacks. Jonathan Alter, the book's author, is a columnist for Bloomberg View and a contributor to MSNBC.
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Rivera contested the book's claims in an article on Fox News on Monday. In it, Rivera wrote that before he reached the "Fox & Friends" studio on that day, he had seen a report on the network in which the parents of two US servicemen who died in the Benghazi attack had accused President Barack Obama of refusing to send available military assets to help at the scene of the attack in Libya. The accusations stuck in Rivera's craw.
"By the time I got to the Fox & Friends studio on Nov. 2, I was already steaming mad...the parent' outrage and heartbreak was understandable because it was based on the premise that there were either armed drones or fighter jets or an AC-130 gunship or a team of Special Operators that could have intervened at least in time to save the two US personnel killed seven hours after the initial attack."
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But the premise was a false one, Rivera wrote.
"Having already spoken with highly placed sources in the Pentagon, and also having spoken at length with retired Gen. Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the Army, by Nov. 2 I knew that we had no military assets in the region that could have saved those precious lives, none.
"So when my friend and colleague Eric Bolling made the allegation of willful inaction by the Obama administration on "Fox & Friends" that morning, I pounced, furious that what I perceived to be a false narrative was being used unfairly to attack the president on the eve of the election just five days away."
But the segment in which Rivera argued with Bolling was not cut any shorter than normal, nor was his microphone cut off, according to Rivera.
"At no time then or ever has my boss, Roger Ailes, or anyone at Fox News cut my microphone to prevent me from speaking."
Alter suggests in the book that the alleged decision to cut Rivera's mic was an unusual one for Ailes, saying that the network's views typically reflected Ailes' own to the extent that the executive did not need to such heavy-handed measures.
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