Jesse Watters debuts as host of the Fox News show at 8pm weekdays on Mondays. He considers himself a “political comedian,” offering a stark contrast to predecessors Tucker Carlson and Bill O’Reilly. Jason Koerner/Getty Images hide caption
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Jason Koerner/Getty Images
Jesse Watters debuts as host of the Fox News show at 8pm weekdays on Mondays. He considers himself a “political comedian,” offering a stark contrast to predecessors Tucker Carlson and Bill O’Reilly.
Jason Koerner/Getty Images
Fox News is tapping a controversial self-described “political comedian” to revitalize its flagship 8 p.m. show, which has struggled to regain viewers since the network fired star Tucker Carlson April.
Monday is the debut at 8 pm of Jesse Watters, a star with a wink and a smile, the last quarter of the editor of his book, How I Saved the World. But his rapid rise is no laughing matter for his critics.
“This is someone who is that funny guy from high school who stood there and quietly made fun of the nerds and the rest of us stood and laughed with him,” says Julie Roginsky, a former commentator on Fox News and guest anchor. “Most of us got over that and decided it wasn’t the right path in life.”
“He can be very affable,” says Joe Muto, who worked with Watters at Fox. But Muto cautions that Watters’ on-air success has been based on “attacking,” making fun of people without much height. “His comedy has a mean streak, a sort of bullying aspect to it.”
In the 26-year history of Fox News, only two people have ever hosted the slot that Watters will occupy at 8pm weekdays: Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson. Both became huge stars at Fox, and both were fired in the midst of scandal, six years apart almost to the day.
Roginsky argues that there is a stark contrast between Watters and his prime-time predecessors: O’Reilly, Carlson and Sean Hannity, who will follow Watters at 9 p.m.
“I didn’t agree with most everything that came out of O’Reilly’s or Hannity’s mouth,” Roginsky says. “But they weren’t there to be clowns. They were there to provide what Fox considered serious analysis of the news of the day.”
A donation to Obama, a defense of Trump, and thoughts on QAnon
In 2012, as an associate producer, Watters donated $500 to then-President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, his only known federal political contribution.
These days, Watters has appeared on air as a defender of former President Donald Trump. He has some too twice cited QAnon approval in the air, although later he distanced himself of the conspiracy theory in a statement released on air.
“He’s not very sharp, but he’s very good at telling the audience what he thinks they want to hear,” says former Fox commentator Jonah Goldberg, who resigned from the network over Carlson’s promotion of discredited conspiracy theories about the siege of the United States Congress in January 2021. .
Fox has paid nearly $800 million in recent months to settle two lawsuits in which Carlson was prominent. The biggest followed rulings by a Delaware judge that Fox had defamed a voting technology company when four hosts, including Carlson, and their guests falsely suggested it had helped cheat Trump out of the 2020 election.
Most recently, Fox paid $12 million to settle a lawsuit by a former Carlson senior producer alleging a workplace saturated with bigotry and misogyny.
Fox’s decision to ax Carlson in April led to a ratings collapse, down about a quarter during prime time in the second quarter of the year. MSNBC sometimes beat Fox in prime time, a rare occurrence before.
Fox has responded with a pincer move: moving Watters an hour later to 8 p.m. and moving conservative comedian Greg Gutfeld an hour earlier to 10 p.m. (Laura Ingraham, a more mainstream conservative voice who had held the 10 p.m., Watters’ old 7 p.m. slot has been given)
Fox kicks off the new line-up with a marketing slogan that recalls its policy: “The right voices for the right time.”
A spokesperson told NPR that Watters, Fox News Media Chief Executive Suzanne Scott and the network’s top executive, Meade Cooper, were too busy to be interviewed for this story. The network also did not respond to specific questions, other than to point to previous public statements Watters and Fox made after their on-air remarks sparked public outcry.
Watters rose to fame through popular and offensive satire
Watters, now 45, joined Fox shortly after graduating with a degree in history from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and has never worked anywhere else.
Muto recalls Watters being ambitious, throwing himself into his work and wearing sharp suits that mirrored what the male stars wore on air. When the two were producers of The O’Reilly Factor, Watters knew how to present segments that O’Reilly liked, Muto says. They often involved interviews with people on the street. Sometimes they were more like ambushes of some obscure state official or university professor who had said something that bothered O’Reilly.
“A lot of the people and targets he would pick were a little unfortunate,” says Muto. “They weren’t prepared to have the gaze of this great media mogul upon them.”
The pieces were fun, Muto says, and eventually popular. They were common enough that they had their own brand: Watters’ World. In 2015, Watters was given his own weekend show of the same name, but continued to work for O’Reilly. (Fox fired Muto for leaking information about the network to news and gossip site Gawker. He wrote his own book about experience.)
“They were cherry picking,” Muto says now of Watters’ segments. “He’s not interested in getting the smartest, most compelling answers. He’s interested in getting people who stutter or stone, in the case of college students, or barely speak English, in the case of Chinatown.”
Recovering from accusations of racism and sexism
In 2016, spurred by then-candidate Trump’s focus on China as a campaign issue, O’Reilly sent Watters to New York City’s Chinatown. His long segment, which incorporated clips from old movies, played on racial stereotypes, mixed in cultural references from other Asian countries, and poked fun at elderly residents who didn’t seem to understand English.
The Association of Asian American Journalists and other civic leaders he apologized. The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng delivered a remarkable slide: “If you’re going to be racist, at least get your stereotypes right!” He also went to Chinatown to conduct thoughtful interviews, and not just in English.
O’Reilly acknowledged that some elements were “above the line”. Waters he tweeted that he was sorry if anyone was offended.
The backlash didn’t slow him down. The following year, Fox gave Watters a co-host gig on the popular weekday show The Five and his own weeknight early evening show.
On air, Watters has asked if female students could be rowed by teachers, mocked the homeless and even made what was uniformly considered a crude sex joke about Ivanka Trump. He gestured with his hand to his mouth and said, “So, I really don’t understand what’s going on here, but I really liked the way he spoke into the microphone.”
After the outcry that followed, Watters claimed that he had thought she looked like a DJ and suddenly announced that she was taking a vacation.
Among Watters’ critics is his liberal family on Long Island. In his shows he has presented the loving rebukes of his mother, a child psychologist. “She’s always telling me two things that are constant in these texts,” Watters said The Atlantic in 2019. “One, stop yelling. And two, don’t be too pro-Trump. I don’t really listen either.”
Fox turns to Watters after an acrimonious split with Carlson
Former Fox collaborator Roginsky left Fox after filing a lawsuit accusing its former chief executive, the late Roger Ailes, of sexual harassment and other executives of retaliation. He received a six-figure settlement. Fox fired Ailes in 2016 and O’Reilly in 2017 after allegations emerged that each had sexually harassed multiple women at Fox, allegations each denied.
Fox officials say the culture has transformed.
However, Roginsky draws a straight line between what she calls the toxic environment she experienced off-air and what Watters says about it.
“Let’s call it like it is,” he says. “It’s audience maintenance.” She says Fox can claim he’s joking, but Watters delivers what Fox viewers want.
Watters divorced his first wife in late 2019 and soon married a former producer of his show, Watters World. he claimed in the air who wooed his second wife while she worked for him by sabotaging his car, letting the air out of the tires so she would have to ask him for a ride. “It works like a charm,” he said when a co-host asked if it was a maneuver he had used more than once.
Once again, Watters he later said it was just a joke.
“Fox lets some of its hosts get away with it [it] saying, ‘Oh, he’s just kidding,’ if they crossed the line,” Roginsky says. “”That’s just Gregory [Gutfield]. That’s just Jesse being funny. You shouldn’t take these guys seriously or literally because they are here for entertainment only.
“And the reality is, of course, that everything they say has to be taken seriously and is taken seriously by the millions of viewers who watch them daily and subscribe to their worldview.”
