Fox News has picked the longtime on-air personality Jesse Watters to take over the weeknight hour formerly occupied by Tucker Carlson, formerly the network’s highest-rated star before he was ousted in April.
Watters, 44, is known for his aggressive interviewing style with politicians and private citizens alike. He has drawn repeated backlash for amplifying offensive racial stereotypes, xenophobia and sexist rhetoric on air.
Unlike Carlson, who had stints at CNN and MSNBC before coming to Fox News, Watters joined the network as a production assistant two decades ago and has been with the company ever since.
He first appeared on air in 2003 with The O’Reilly Factor, where he became known for the man-on-the-street interview segment Watters’ World. The segment became synonymous with ambushing people with provocative questions to get laughs and “own the libs”, as the Washington Post columnist and commentator Paul Waldman put it in an interview with the Guardian. Watters’ World later became its own Saturday night show, which ran for about five years.
The Fox News insider has since embraced both what he calls political humor and spots on the network’s opinion shows, becoming a co-host of The Five and host of his own weeknight hour, Jesse Watters Primetime. His promotion could be a signal that the network is moving toward blurring the lines between news and entertainment even further, according to media industry experts and longtime Fox watchers.
But critics warn that Watters, who has a smaller national following than Carlson, could more easily get away with spewing dangerous rhetoric to his audience with his new platform. Watters presents himself as a clown not to be taken seriously but loyal Fox News watchers will take his words for what they are, according to Andrew Lawrence, a senior researcher at the liberal watchdog Media Matters For America who has watched Watters’ shows on Fox News for six years.
“There hasn’t been a single advertiser boycott of Jesse Watters,” said Lawrence, whereas major companies pulled ads from Carlson’s hour in 2020. “That lack of pushback, I think, sort of creates this environment where he’s going to get away with a lot more,” said Lawrence.
Watters has been criticized for a number of controversial segments, which seem to have become more egregious over time. In one widely criticized segment ahead of the 2016 election in New York’s Chinatown, Watters repeatedly played on harmful Asian stereotypes, including asking two women if he was “supposed to bow to say hello”.
Watters also seemed to conflate Chinese, Japanese and Korean cultures. In a series of clips, Watters asked a man if he knew karate, a Japanese martial art, then visited a taekwondo studio – taekwondo is Korean – and followed it with a clip of martial artist Bruce Lee, who was born in Hong Kong. He also poked fun at elderly Chinese residents who didn’t respond to his questions.
The Asian American Journalists Association called the segment “rude, offensive, mocking, derogatory and damaging” and demanded from Watters an on-air apology to “prevent this insensitive type of coverage in the future”.
Responding to the criticism, Watters tweeted: “My man-on-the-street interviews are meant to be taken as tongue-in-cheek and I regret if anyone found offense.” He called himself a “political humorist” and said the segment was “intended to be a light piece, as all Watters World segments are”.
As a show host, Watters has made homelessness a frequent talking point, saying the government should not invest in affordable housing and that being unhoused is a choice. In June, Watters said homeless people had “failed in life” and described living in tents as “antisocial behavior”.
Watters also compared the progressive US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to an unripe banana and said she shouldn’t run for president before she is married, and that she was too young.
“With age comes wisdom and she’s pretty young. That’s my nice way of saying she’s not very smart,” Watters said on The Five during a segment discussing potential presidential candidates in 2024.
“She’s not ripe enough to run for president. First, she has to get married. She has to plan a wedding. You want to plan a wedding and run for president at the same time?”
Watters’ career at Fox News has included being both a news commentator and someone seeking laughs, a fairly new strategy at the network aiming to bridge news and entertainment, according to experts.
“Watters is probably the clearest example of taking a young personality and slowly bringing him along,” said Matt Sienkiewicz, an associate professor of communication and international studies at Boston College.
In 2007, Fox tried to insert more comedy onto their news channel, premiering a satirical show The ½ Hour News Hour. It failed to attract an audience and ended after less than a year on the air.
“Part of his thing is bringing a more youthful energy and a more comedic energy – whether or not you find it funny,” Sienkiewicz, who is also the co-author of That’s Not Funny, a book on rightwing comedy, said of Watters.
Watters brings to primetime a “comedic slant on the news”, added Nick Marx, Sienkiewicz’s co-author and an associate media and visual culture professor at Colorado State University. Appealing to a younger-skewing, male-skewing audience isn’t a surprise, he said.
“You don’t have to have the sound on to recognize that he’s going to deliver the kind of content that you want. He’s just the kind of generic, handsome, young-ish person who’s on my TV screen. He’s scowling his face … he’s probably angry about the same things I am.”
But Watters has big shoes to fill when it comes to audience and reach. Carlson’s show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, consistently brought in the most viewers for the network and across cable news, but ratings for the hour have dipped since his exit.
Carlson averaged 3.25 million viewers in March, his last full month on the air, while Watters averaged 2.67 million viewers, according to numbers from Nielsen. The network’s overall viewership has dropped since Carlson’s exit, reeling in an average of 1.49 million primetime viewers per day in June, down 31% from the same period last year.
“He’s less likely to kind of chart his own path in the way that Carlson eventually did,” said Waldman. “Nobody gets hired at Fox because the executives think they’re going to do something different.”
Since his firing, Carlson has started posting videos on Twitter. Fox sent him a cease and desist letter, saying the ex-host breached his contract, Axios first reported. A Fox News spokesperson would not comment on the letter when asked by the Guardian.
As well as Watters, a handful of Fox personalities will get new hours in July. The host Laura Ingraham, who formerly held the 10pm ET slot, is being bumped up. She’ll move into Watters’ current hour, kicking off primetime at 7pm ET, the network announced on Monday. Sean Hannity will keep his 9pm ET slot, and Greg Gutfeld’s satirical talk show will follow.
Carlson’s firing came days after the network paid $787.5m to settle a blockbuster defamation lawsuit exposing hundreds of internal messages among its stars – including Carlson – and was reportedly related to negative comments he made about executives. The Los Angeles Times also reported that the decision was related to a lawsuit filed against Carlson by a former producer alleging workplace discrimination and harassment.
Watters was not one of the Fox personalities whose messages were highlighted in legal filings as part of the Dominion case.
In addition to Carlson, there have been a number of high-profile exits at Fox News in the weeks following the settlement. Carlson’s producer, Justin Wells, was ousted with him in April and more members of his staff have since departed.
The Fox executive Raj Shah, who led the company’s “brand protection unit” left his post in May.
The longtime Fox voice Geraldo Rivera is also leaving the network. In a video message filmed on a boat and posted to Twitter, Rivera said he was fired from The Five and so he decided to quit the network. The network said it reached an “amicable conclusion” with Rivera over the past few weeks.
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