The big winner of Fox’s new prime time lineup is Jesse Watters, the guy who “joked” about having Dr. Anthony Fauci assassinated, wanted host and Senior VP Neil Cavuto fired for telling the truth about the 2020 election, and who described Trump’s call for violence against a protester as a “magical” moment.
Fox News revealed its prime time shake up this morning. As The Washington Post reports, the new lineup has Jesse Watters at 8 PM ET (Tucker Carlson’s former hour); Sean Hannity remaining at 9 PM, “comedian” Greg Gutfeld at 10, and Laura Ingraham moving to Watters’ old slot at 7. Fox News @ Night, the network’s late night “news” show, will move from midnight to 11 PM.
The new lineup takes effect July 17. It closely tracks what had been reported previously about Fox’s plans.
The choice of Watters to replace Carlson proves Fox wants a violence-promoting, America-hating, disinforming and white-power advocate to keep that slot. Some of Watters’ lowlights that Fox has at least tacitly endorsed:
Watters got his last Fox promotion just a few weeks after urging an audience to stalk and ambush Dr. Anthony Fauci in order to troll him with a MAGA conspiracy theory about Covid’s origins that would be, as Watters put it, a “deadly” “kill shot” that will “hit him in the face” and leave him “dead.”
He has a long record of playing to viewers’ bigotry. In a 2013 ambush interview for The O’Reilly Factor, e.g., Watters badgered and berated a Black congressman for speaking out against Trayvon Martin killer George Zimmerman: Watters said, “I believe, 73% of black children are born out of wedlock. It’s not the government’s fault that that’s happening. It’s not the white man’s fault that that’s happening. Is it? …White people have access to guns, too, and they’re not killing people at the same rate as black teens are. …My only point is that young, black men are ten times more likely to commit homicides than whites and Hispanic men combined.”
Watters also made an infamously bigoted visit to Chinatown, in 2016, for The O’Reilly Factor.
More recently, Watters dubiously announced that he “can tell” an undocumented immigrant just by looking at him or her.
Watters overlooked the MAGA sentiments of Paul Pelosi’s attacker and instead described him as “an illegal alien from Canada,” who “makes hemp bracelets in Berkeley,” with “a long criminal history, including elder abuse and a slew of other felonies, but wasn’t deported. San Francisco is a sanctuary city.”
Watters has quite a record of misogyny, too.
Of course, Watters attacks and smears transgender youth with lies, too.
During the recent debt ceiling negotiations, Watters urged Rep. James Comer to hold the U.S. economy hostage in order to blackmail President Joe Biden into resigning.
After President Biden called protesters who accused him of being a socialist “idiots,” Watters joined in the ensuing poutrage by gushing over the “magical” moment when Trump urged his supporters to “knock the crap out of” a protester.
The recently revealed Dominion defamation case briefs revealed Watters to be as pro-disinformation as the guy he’s replacing. In a text, Watters told Carlson that Neil Cavuto, Chris Wallace and other 2020 election truth tellers “have got to go” and that the network should hire “some Trump people” to replace them.
In our post about Watters’ Dominion text, we expressed doubt that Watters’ desire to purge truth tellers from the network would hinder his coming promotion. Sadly, that has been proven correct.
A lengthy Insider profile of Watters rightly points out that he is more of a follower than a right-wing thought leader, as Carlson was. Unlike Carlson, who acted as an “assignment editor” for the rest of the network, Media Matters’ Andrew Lawrence described Watters as “just some guy who's been groomed to be a cable-news host, he has no expertise on anything. He just says the right words."
Whether Watters is able to spew Carlson-eque rhetoric well enough for Fox to keep or up its white-supremacist, violence-promoting game in the old Carlson slot remains to be seen.
We can be pretty sure that Watters will probably do his best to replace Carlson in every way possible. Comments from an unnamed Insider source who has interacted with Watters before and after he got his own show suggest he became more obnoxious since his old days of acting as an O'Reilly ambush-interviewer. That source describes him as having become "really smug" and a "total douchebag" since he got his own show. Now, he'll have every reason to become even more so, given the shoes he has been tapped to fill and Fox's recent ratings woes.
More from The Post:
The changes come amid a significant decline in viewers since the network’s decision to oust Carlson. For the week of June 5, MSNBC’s prime-time lineup attracted more viewers than Fox’s prime-time block for the first time in several years. The following week, Fox regained its edge over MSNBC in total viewers but lost among the 25-to-54 age demographic prized by advertisers.
Watters will reportedly remain as a cohost of The Five.
(Watters image via screen grab)
Carlson’s frantic attempts to out-crazy the crowd at Newsmax sometimes could be unintentionally amusing – particularly his attempt to lionize Richard Nixon, but mostly he was a boring drone of risible insults. Watters seems to still be the creepy stalker he was for O’Reilly’s ambush spots. Given how quickly Fox dumped O’Reilly and Bolling and Bongino and Carlson, one would think it’s only a matter of time before Watters gets the axe too. Gutfeld, on the other hand, seems to understand his position as a resident troll. He’s likely to last another decade at Fox, akin to one of those cockroaches that just cannot be stamped out.