Tonight marks the official launch of Fox News’ new primetime slate, which features two of the network’s most popular hosts moving their shows into new time slots in an attempt to juice the ratings slump that began with the late-April ouster of Tucker Carlson.
Former Bill O’Reilly lackey Jesse Watters, who had been hosting a show at 7 p.m. ET, will now move an hour later to Carlson’s old time slot, which was temporarily hosted by a cadre of Fox B-teamers and drew roughly half of Carlson’s regular viewership.
Additionally, Fox’s resident “comedian” Greg Gutfeld shifts his political satire program to 10 p.m., pushing Laura Ingraham into the 7 p.m. hour—and out of “primetime” as commonly defined as programming between 8 and 11 p.m. The self-described “King of Late Night” Gutfeld has suggested his program will still be considered a “late-night” talk show, and that late-night just starts an hour earlier now.
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Meanwhile, primetime stalwart Sean Hannity will anchor the new lineup as he remains in his standard 9 p.m. slot. Once the most-watched host in cable news, the Fox News original had seen his ratings slip even before Carlson’s stunning departure, suggesting that conservative audiences have grown somewhat weary of his GOP sycophancy.
Still, with the network seemingly growing disenchanted with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to supplant former President Donald Trump as the Republican Party’s standard-bearer, Fox almost assuredly knows that Hannity and his new primetime cohorts will do whatever is good for business.
Whether that means licking Trump’s boots or pumping up a new GOP challenger, this “new” primetime triumvirate will play ball.
In other words, this is the same old Fox News you’ve known all along—the communications arm of the Republican Party that has doubled as a MAGA personality cult when necessary.
The only thing that has changed, of course, is the network is missing the host that had become both Fox’s and the political right’s most influential ideological voice, sparked by his conspiracy-dabbled commentary, blood-and-soil nationalism, extreme anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, and embrace of authoritarian autocrats.
While this isn’t to say that the new primetime team won’t still be filled with anti-”woke” punditry and demonization of all things left—all in furtherance of the American right’s agenda—this trio doesn’t enjoy Carlson’s reputation of independence and iconoclasm. Instead, Gutfeld, Watters, and Hannity are all famously loyal company men who are more interested in protecting their jobs than going against the grain.
“While Watters, Hannity, and Gutfeld all have long records of toxic commentary, no one would describe them as men of ideas,” Media Matters senior fellow Matt Gertz wrote last week. “Hannity is a down-the-line Republican Party propagandist, devoted to the success of his party above all else. And Gutfeld and Watters are associated more with a mean-spirited, sarcastic affect and an own-the-libs mentality than any distinct viewpoint.”
Gertz’s colleague Andrew Lawrence, a senior researcher for the liberal media watchdog, also told The Daily Beast that none of the hosts in the post-Carlson primetime lineup can replicate what the far-right star brought to the table.
“What Tucker was so good at was that every little thing was an attack on Western civilization,” Lawrence noted. “None of these other hosts really have that—that existential threat and everything the left is doing.”Carlson really believes “he was there to protect Western civilization,” Lawrence continued, adding that Watters simply won’t be able to get audiences to feel that he believes those same things.
“I mean, you know, when somebody's disingenuous when they're just saying the words that they have to you can tell that somebody doesn't really believe it,” he declared. “Jesse Watters is just trying to get the biggest paycheck he can and he’ll say whatever he has to say.”
Watters isn’t alone when it comes to seemingly coming across as cynically following wherever the conservative winds blow Fox’s tone.
Gutfeld, for instance, was an outspoken critic of Trump who, as such winds changed, became one of the twice-impeached ex-president’s biggest acolytes on Fox.
Like Watters and Hannity, Gutfeld’s defenses of Trump and his sycophancy towards the former president have occasionally reached absurd levels of self-parody. Besides justifying Trump’s post-Charlottesville remarks and brushing off the ex-president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Gutfeld has routinely debased himself to tout Trump. “I can't recall a single instance of Trump actually aggressively going after an individual,” he once ridiculously said.
Gutfeld’s Trumpist shift, by his own admission, was a transparent effort to remain in the good graces of Fox News’ core viewership—following Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott’s credo to “respect the audience” and give them what they want. (A mission statement that apparently cost the network nearly $800 million earlier this year.)
“She was like, ‘Greg, you should maybe prepare for what happens if he wins,’” he told The New York Times last month, noting that Scott suggested he reconsider his anti-Trump stance prior to the 2016 election.
In his 2021 book about Fox News, former CNN media anchor Brian Stelter explained that Gutfeld’s rise at Fox would have likely not been possible had he continued to remain critical of Trump.
“The alternative could have hit Gutfeld in the wallet. Fox made him a millionaire several times over—between his TV shows, the books he promoted on TV, his ticketed speaking gigs across the country—so ‘Greg has made a cynical calculation,’ an insider said. ‘There’s no point in being anti-Trump,’” Stelter wrote.
In the end, with the network pinching pennies following the devastating settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, and other lawsuits potentially taking more out of the company’s bottom line, the network decided to stay in-house and rearrange the deck chairs in primetime. No big-name outside hires; just the same old guys that Fox’s audience is used to.
With another presidential election right around the corner, the conservative cable giant is banking on anger over Carlson’s firing subsiding as right-wing viewers get back into the habit of mainlining Fox News to feed their daily outrage needs.
In other words, they will be fooled again.
