A struggling Fox News — and I use the term “News” loosely — is losing audience after a trifecta of public embarrassments. A peek into their internal emails revealed a duplicitous strategy aimed at fooling their audience into believing they were on board with former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, while privately many of their highest profile executives and on-air voices actually “hate him” and wanted him to go away.
That was followed by a historic $787.5 million settlement with Dominion, who accused the network of allowing false and libelous statements on the air. A settlement that resulted in the firing of its most popular primetime host, Tucker Carlson.
The ratings result? Year-to-year loss of 25% overall and a 38% loss in primetime. A huge 62% drop in the demo that advertisers look at. And its main right-wing competition, Newsmax doubled its previously pitiful ratings.
Fox’s answer to its troubles? Carry on and in fact move its most controversial conspiracy theory-loving, racist cultural warrior into Carlson’s old spot at 8:00 PM.
Jesse Watters is a sad — even desperate — attempt to bring back angry viewers who left in droves over the last year because Tucker was no longer on the air to echo their conspiracy theories. They miss the guy who called the insurrection on January 6, just a bunch of tourists.
Watters will not disappoint.
He has been groomed for stardom by Fox News, which has survived the loss of other big-name anchors including Bill O’Reilly — for whom Watters served as a “fake” correspondent who routinely hit the streets to deliver some of cable’s most disgusting segments.
Highlights include harassing Asians in New York’s Chinatown, mocking their speech and feigning karate moves in a bit the Asian American Journalists Association labeled “rude, offensive, mocking, derogatory and damaging”.
Lately, Watters’ “humor” has been directed at the homeless. Last week, he called unhoused people in San Francisco “bags of flesh mutating on the sidewalk.” Watters is also an expert profiler if you listen to him. He once claimed he could tell a poor family sifting the trash for cans were “illegals” by just looking at them, because he is a “city kid”.
In reality, Watters isn’t funny. He is just mean.
His delivery is actually harsher than Carlson’s who could not hide his elitist background, smoothly delivering conspiracies and hate in a slick erudite style. Watters is more direct in his anger, closer to O’Reilly than Tucker.
What to expect? Right-wing red meat. Watters is deep into “deep state” conspiracies. He often falsely claims — with no evidence — “the Biden crime family” has been bribed by oligarchs out to destroy America, extorting the President, forcing him to allow “open borders”. Of course, Watters offers no proof and ignores facts such as the new Biden-enforced restrictions on asylum. Politifact, an independent fact checker labels ‘open borders” false.
Speaking of Watters lies caught on Politifact, he said special counsel John Durham’s report accused Hillary Clinton of hiring people to hack Trump’s home and office computers. Politifact ruled the charge “false”.
He claimed while the Trump administration was slow on testing Americans, they were quick to ban travel into the US and that was more critical in saving lives. No, that was false.
And the esteemed Mr. Watters also made the lame claim that former Clinton aide John Podesta’s computer was hacked because his password was “password”. No, that’s false, too.
In summary, Fox is going to give its audience what it likely wants: More conspiracies, lies, and propaganda. The sad part is that despite Watters’ comparatively rough edges, it will probably work.
Jim Avila previously served as a weekly columnist for Barrett News Media. An Award-winning journalist with four decades of reporting and anchoring experience, Jim worked as Senior National Correspondent, 20/20 Correspondent, and White House Correspondent for ABC News. Prior to his time with ABC, he spent a decade with NBC News, and worked locally in Los Angeles and Chicago for KNBC, and WBBM. He can be found on Twitter @JimAvilaABC.
