Fox News finally settled on their permanent replacement for Tucker Carlson. It certainly took some time as the network tried out and shuffled around a bunch of different anchors for his slot. Over four were tried out in their rotation, but nothing seemed to stick.
Fox has been dealing with a ratings dive after Carlson’s unexpected firing, as AP News notes. He would usually average over 3.25 million viewers for his 8pm show. Watters has been an increasing visible face seen on the network. He got his start with “man on the street” style interviews when Bill O’Reilly was filling the coveted timeslot. He then made frequent appearances on Fox News’s latenight comedy show “Red Eye,” and then became a key member of “The Five,” a conversational style show hosted by five comedic-leaning people.
Interestingly enough, Watters will also remain with “The Five.” Greg Gutfeld, who is also on the program, will see his show move up to the 10pm slot from the 11th hour. Gutfeld could can call the time slot improvement a promotion, although he was in the mix to replace Carlson for quite some time.
Sean Hannity breaks even, his show will remain at the same 9p.m. hour he’s held for years. But veteran opinion-style anchor Laura Ingraham sees a bit of a demotion. She’ll go from the more glamorous 10pm slot to the 7pm hour, where she’ll have national and local news to compete with.
Fox News is probably wise to keep their talent, and to focus on the opinion-leaning figures. MSNBC scored first place for primetime for the first time in over a year due to Trump indictment, beating Fox News by 200,000 viewers with 1.52 million total. CNN, doing their best to go more objective and pivot to the middle, nabbed just 677,000 viewers.
MSNBC is winning because they’re unapologetically left. Fox News was winning because they were unapologetically right, but their main star got the boot.
We’ll see if Watters has the chops. He is young and has a key comedic element, something that Gutfeld sort of pioneered, proving it to be a working formula. But as Fox legally tries to prevent Carlson from airing his show on Twitter, the struggling cable news station might be eliciting too much ill will for them to make a successful second start.
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