Fox News’ newest program, “The Fox News Specialists,” will start airing Monday, May 1, at 5 PM ET, during the hour that The Five (now in prime time) formerly aired. Clearly, the choice of cohosts, Eric Bolling, Katherine Timpf and Eboni K. Williams is a deliberate show of diversity both in thought (sort of), age and ethnicity. But how “new” it will be remains to be seen.
Variety describes what we'll see starting Monday:
Each night, Bolling, Timpf and Williams will tap two guest experts to talk about the top stories and headlines of the day. . The daily “specialists” will join the co-hosts to provide unique and unpredictable analysis on the stories trending in America.
“Eric, Katherine and Eboni’s diverse opinions and backgrounds will provide our audience with an hour of informative and entertaining analysis on daily stories that are most important to Americans,” said Suzanne Scott, executive vice president of programming, in a prepared statement. “The combination of the co-hosts’ expertise in business, millennial and legal topics, respectively, will make for lively and compelling discourse.”
Other than the fact that the cohosts are two relatively young women, one (Williams) an African American and neither quite as sycophantically pro-Trump as Bolling, it's an open question as to how different the show will be from the rest of the Fox lineup, other than in appearance.
Bolling is a long-time Fox host who has made a name for himself with racism and sexism. But in case you are not familiar with the other two, here's some background:
Katherine Timpf: A Fox News Kind Of Non-Trumper
Timpf has called Trump “a hack in a trucker’s hat” in a 2015 article purporting to take him to task over his “blood coming out of her wherever” attack on Megyn Kelly. But Timpf, supposedly a comedian as well as a reporter, overlooked the implications of a Republican presidential candidate’s misogyny (which was the point of Kelly’s question that began their feud) as well as the implications of a Republican presidential candidate attacking the press in her article. Instead, Timpf complained Trump was bad at jokes:
The fact the Donald Trump doesn’t regret his comments about Megyn Kelly is mind-blowing — because any self-respecting person would be embarrassed for having told such a stupid joke in front of the entire country.
Even if you think it wasn’t sexist, even if you consider him some kind of hero waging a war on political correctness, there’s still one thing you can’t deny: The joke was dumb. It’s the exact kind of thing you’d hear at open-mic night at a bar, except at least most of those guys have the sense to feel humiliated once they realize no one’s laughing.
On Fox News, Timpf has not exactly been courageous in her comments about Trump. In a discussion obviously meant to spin his mockery of a disabled New York Times reporter, Timpf blasted Trump but nonetheless characterized his obvious lies (about the mockery and about having witnessed American Muslims cheering the 9/11 attack) as "mistakes."
TIMPF: “He doesn’t just not apologize, he goes on the offensive and he says, ‘How dare you make this up? You need to apologize to me.’ Every single time. He has a delusional level of faith in himself, which honestly, it must be fun, right? To think that you’ve never ever made a mistake?”
In other discussions, Timpf has been right-on-message for Fox. In the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting, she whitewashed right-wing violence by ridiculously griping, “There’s been more people dying from selfies in 2015 alone than have ever died in violence in abortion clinics.” She also regurgitated the Fox attack line, that President Obama didn’t use the term “radical, Islamic terrorism.”
Eboni K. Williams Is Fox’s Favorite Kind Of “Liberal”
Williams is often presented as a liberal balance on Fox. But, even though she says she's an independent who voted for a write-in candidate, her “liberal” commentary just so happens to consistently go along with Fox's Republican agenda.
When Donald Trump attacked the press after it caught him lying about donating money to veterans after his fundraiser, Williams gushed about his “complete boss move.”
In a discussion after NBC’s Matt Lauer was widely criticized as having gone too easy on Trump and too hard on Clinton in a town hall, Williams didn’t just praise Lauer, she adopted a right-wing attack line against Clinton: “I think it’s Hillary Clinton’s own fault that, you know, 13 minutes were taken up by emails because of choices she made as secretary of state.”
Williams also surely endeared herself to Fox suits when she agreed with Bill O’Reilly, in May 2016, that she never heard Trump say anything bad about black people. This was a few months after Trump came under fire for refusing to disavow former Klansman David Duke’s support. But even at that time, Williams had assured Fox viewers, “No, he’s not a racist.”
Williams even went to the right of O’Reilly when she joined the Fox News pile-on against President Obama’s visit to a mosque.
So will The Fox News Specialists really depart from Fox News orthodoxy or just put some new faces on the same old, same old? We’ll see.
Meanwhile, I have to wonder why Fox put The Five in prime time instead of this show. The Five, almost always guest-free, is a bunch of relatively no-name pundits pontificating about the same news topics discussed everywhere else on Fox. All in a totally fair and balanced panel of four conservatives and one liberal.
So I’m also wondering, is Fox trying out “The Fox News Specialists” in this time slot with an eye toward moving it or something like it to prime time in the future?
Stay tuned!
Meanwhile, watch Williams attack Obama’s visit to the mosque, from the February 3, 2016 The O’Reilly Factor and Timpf attack those fearing right-wing violence, from the June 19, 2016 Fox & Friends, below.
If Fox really wanted to show they’ve changed, they’d give the ‘liberal’ role to Julie Roginsky.