Fox Business Network has announced that Larry Kudlow’s new show will begin next week, in the 4 PM time slot and re-air at 7, when Lou Dobbs Tonight formerly re-ran.

The 4 PM slot is the current home of After the Bell, the show once co-anchored by Melissa Francis (until she made a legal claim of gender pay disparity against the network). Brian Stelter reports that Kudlow has been given the difficult task of revitalizing FBN’s afternoons.

"After the Bell," at the key hour after U.S. markets closed, averaged 150,000 viewers, while CNBC's rival show "Closing Bell" averaged 326,000.

…

The business-oriented program on Fox News, "Your World with Neil Cavuto," averaged 1.1 million. Both CNN and MSNBC had upwards of 2 million viewers for the hour.

I’m going to go out on a limb and theorize that this is somehow tied in with Dobbs’ departure. Maybe Dobbs had been told Kudlow was going to take over the 7 PM time and there was some kind of blowup from there.

In any event, while Kudlow is not the hatemonger Dobbs is, he doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy people will make a point of tuning into, unless you love weasely gaslighting about Trump.

You can watch CNN’s Brianna Keilar masterfully take apart Kudlow’s falsehoods in September, below, via Crooks and Liars.

(Kudlow image via screen grab)