Fox News finally got around to replacing Tucker Carlson.
Meet the new guy. Same as the old guy. Except maybe not quite as adept in his just-as-dangerous talking points.
Jesse Watters will replace Carlson in a revamped Fox News prime-time lineup.
Laura Ingraham will shift from 10 p.m. Eastern to 7 p.m. Watters follows at 8 p.m., which is where Carlson’s show was before he was fired in April.
Sean Hannity keeps his 9 p.m. slot and Greg Gutfeld’s late-night-type show moves from up an hour from 11 p.m. to 10 p.m. The new lineup starts July 17.
So, from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. — the most valuable real estate on TV known as prime time — Fox News will have three white male hosts.
Former CNN media reporter Brian Stelter tweeted, “If any other network went with an all-white-guy prime time lineup, there would be criticism.”
And there would be here too if it wasn’t, well, you know, Fox News, which is where it is expected.
The Daily Beast’s Corbin Bolies and Justin Baragona wrote that sources inside Fox told them moving Watters into prime time was the “safe” move. I take that to mean Fox News viewers will be OK with it.
As The New York Times Jeremy W. Peters wrote, “Though some of the names and times of Fox’s most important shows are changing, the overall tone of the coverage is not likely to sound much different to the audience.”
Watters fits right in with Fox News’ prime-time philosophy of bashing liberals.
Peters wrote, “Mr. Watters is a reliably pro-Trump conservative voice who first became widely known to Fox’s audience for his cameos on Bill O’Reilly’s program before the network canceled that show in 2017. His commentary has come under criticism at times, including when he did a segment from Manhattan’s Chinatown in 2016 in which he asked Asian people offensive questions, including whether they knew Karate or bowed when saying hello.”
The Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr wrote, “During a period of soft ratings for the network, Watters has been a success as host of the 7 p.m. hour, which the network had once reserved for news coverage. But he has also been a magnet for criticism. At a conservative political conference in December 2021, Watters encouraged an audience of young conservatives to ‘ambush’ infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci and to finish him off with a rhetorical ‘kill shot’ of pointed questions. Fauci called for Fox to fire Watters, but the network issued a statement defending him and promoted him a few weeks later.”
Those are just a couple of examples of Watters’ on-air commentary that crossed the line. Media Matters of America put together a rather lengthy list of what it called “despicable commentary” over the years.
Media Matters president Angelo Carusone said in a statement, “After Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, Lachlan Murdoch said there would be ‘no change’ in the network’s programming strategy. Today, Fox is making good on that promise. Crowning odious Jesse Watters as the new face of Fox News is a reflection of Fox’s dogged commitment to bigotry and deceit as well as an indication of their desperation to regain audience share. It won’t work, though. Fox’s audience abandoned the network post-Tucker, and those viewers never returned. Jesse Watters’ buffoonish segments of bigotry and culture war vitriol won’t fix that problem for Fox; he’s a liability and a ticking time bomb.”
Ratings for Fox News are down since Carlson was fired. Viewership during Carlson’s old 8 p.m. slot has dropped in half, to about 1.5 million viewers. And, of course, there was the public relations disaster of having to write a $787.5 million check after being sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems.
But overall, throughout the day, Fox News still leads cable news in viewership.