On Monday, the world of 24-hour news cycles was hit with some unexpected news, as Elisabeth Hasselbeck announced that she would be leaving the Fox News Network series Fox & Friends by the end of the year. On Tuesday, an obviously emotional Hasselbeck took to the air to deliver her reasons for leaving the hit morning show.
This is a decision I'm making and I feel the peace of God about it. I'm in a season where the kids need the best of me not the rest of me.
She joked that she’s taking over the position of CBO – chief breakfast officer – at her home. It’s pretty much impossible to argue with anyone who decides to leave a job, no matter how important or TV-related, in order to spend more time with his or her children. (Won’t someone please think of the children?!) She and her husband Tim Hasselbeck , the retired NFL quarterback, have three kids – daughter Grace and sons Taylor and Isaiah – and at this point in the trio’s young lives, having their mom around all the time will undoubtedly be a good thing. Now, when they’re teenagers, it might be a different story.
Throughout her segment, Elisabeth Hasselbeck stressed it being a “really, really hard decision” and vocalized how remorseful she is to be leaving a job she loves, as well as people she highly respects, such as cohosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade. In the scheme of things, Hasselbeck hasn’t been on Fox & Friends for that long, having gotten the job in 2013, which caused her to leave her gig on The View, where she’d been a host for ten years or so. A sufferer of celiac disease, she’s also well-known for penning gluten-free cookbooks, which she’ll have more time to do now, one would assume.
Check out the teary-eyed video below, courtesy of the Fox News website.
As she says, she’ll still be around on Fox & Friends for “about a month,” so it’s possible that she’ll stick around until 2015 comes to a close. But then she wouldn’t necessarily be able to dedicate as much of her attention to Christmas and New Years with the kids, so maybe she’ll head out a week or two before that. Are you guys sorry to see her go?
