Alec Baldwin axed from MSNBC, following homophobic slur, ratings slump Actor Alec Baldwin demands the media step away as his wife Hilaria Thomas carries daughter Carmen in New York on November 15. The US cable news channel MSNBC has ditched outspoken actor Alec Baldwin and axed his new talk show, Up Late, after just a handful of episodes. "Up Late will not continue on MSNBC," a joint statement from the channel and Baldwin's representatives said. It is a mutual parting and we wish Alec all the best. The channel had already suspended Baldwin after he verbally attacked a photographer and used a homophobic slur in his abusive tirade. The photographer was attempting to get a photograph of Baldwin, who was with his wife and child at the time. Unsurprisingly, Baldwin blames "the fundamentalist wing of gay advocacy" for the end of his talk show career, rather than sluggish ratings. "They killed my show," he told the US news website Gothamist. He also took aim at the media firestorm that the initial scandal created. There's nothing you can do when you get thrown in this washing machine, nothing. You know? Nothing," he said. All you end up doing is just defending yourself all day long. In the United States, where the story has been making noise for the past two weeks on news and entertainment programs, there was a measure of sympathy for Baldwin over the intrusion into his privacy, but little tolerance for his choice of language. Compounding the problem even further, Baldwin initially denied that he had even used a gay slur. In the exchange, he was heard calling the photographer a "c--k s-cking f-g." Video of the exchange was obtained by and published on the celebrity news website TMZ. Baldwin denied that claim, and insisted he had used the word "fathead" instead. He followed that with an extraordinary - not to mention awkward - photo opportunity in which he appeared with his openly gay male hairdresser. Am I a homophobe? Baldwin asked. "Yes, big-time," the hairdresser responded, jokingly. But he eventually conceded he had used the offending word, and issued a formal apology. I did not intend to hurt or offend anyone with my choice of words, but clearly I have, and for that I am deeply sorry. Words are important," Baldwin said in the statement. What I said and did this week, as I was trying to protect my family, was offensive and unacceptable. Behavior like this undermines hard-fought rights that I vigorously support," he said. It is not the first time Baldwin has used the same gay slur against photographers and journalists. "Mr Baldwin can't lend his support for equality on paper, while degrading gay people in practice," a spokesman for the gay lobby group GLAAD, Rich Ferraro, said. "It's clearly time he listens to the calls from so many LGBT people and allies to end this pattern of anti-gay slurs," Mr Ferraro said. Baldwin has a long record of anger-fuelled outbursts. Among the highlights are abusing his then-11-year-old daughter Ireland in 2007 by leaving her a voicemail in which he said: "You are a rude, thoughtless little pig. You don't have the brains or the decency as a human being. He also unleashed his rage on New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, who had reviewed poorly his performance in a play. "No one I know of in the theatre reads Brantley except in the way that a doctor reads an X-ray to determine if you have cancer," Baldwin wrote in The Huffington Post. And when he disagreed with a position taken by ultra-conservative newspaper columnist Michelle Malkin, he called her "a world class, crypto fascist hater." Earlier this year, Baldwin called a Daily Mail reporter a "toxic little queen." In some respects, the furor over Baldwin's choice of words distracts from a more tangible commercial issue that his short-lived talk show career faced: despite having been on air for only a few weeks Baldwin's show was struggling in the ratings. When it was launched, MSNBC boss Phil Griffin said he was hoping Baldwin's show would define itself by the quality of its interviews. "It almost doesn't matter who the guest is if you can bring out something that is unique and revealing," Griffin said. I have confidence that he'll be known for his interviews. In truth, however, it never resonated with viewers. Launching to around 654,000 total viewers - not an unreasonable result for a mid-tier news channel like MSNBC - it shed more than 40 per cent of its audience across the five weeks that it aired. The final episode aired drew just 395,000 viewers, only 101,000 of whom fell into the advertiser-friendly demographic of adults aged 25-to-54.