When Fox News announced Jesse Watters would replace Tucker Carlson in the network’s coveted nightly 8 p.m. time slot, it marked a new era for both the host and the outlet where he has worked for his entire cable news career.
In taking over for Carlson, Watters is being handed the reins to what had been Fox’s most highly rated program in prime time.
It’s a key role that suggests the leaders at Fox News have a high degree of confidence in the longtime network insider.
Here are five things to know about Watters and what to watch for as he settles into his new gig at Fox.
Watters is a Fox insider
Watters, 44, got his start at Fox News as a production assistant in 2002 shortly after graduating from college.
He’s since served in a long run of roles at the network, including as a correspondent for Bill O’Reilly’s prime time show, where he made his mark when that was Fox’s top-rated prime time program.
Watters has grown up with Fox over the last two decades, hosting a weekend program dubbed “Watters’ World” before earning a spot as a leading panelist on “The Five,” today the network’s most watched program.
Carlson, conversely, came to Fox after previous hosting gigs at competitors MSNBC and CNN.
During his more than six-year run at Fox, Carlson’s prime-time perch was widely viewed in Republican circles as the go-to proving ground for GOP candidates.
This was most recently evident during House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) speakership fight, during which Carlson attacked the Republican leader and demanded conservatives in his caucus withhold votes until McCarthy agreed to their demands.
It remains an open question whether Watters can chart a similar path as Fox’s top influence peddler and garner the same level of credibility as Carlson with both national political operatives and Fox’s viewers, particularly those who were angered by the network’s decision to oust Carlson.
Watters is likely to bring a new style of punditry to the hour
Watters is a different kind of television personality than Carlson.
Whereas Carlson’s monologues and segments were often biting, incendiary, and combative toward liberals, media figures, and others in positions of power, Watters has used a “happy warrior” mantra to stand out from other pundits on Fox’s roster.
Carlson often painted for his audience a dystopian picture in which a cabal of liberal elites were eroding so-called American values and ruled over the everyday citizen with an iron fist.
Carlson left Fox just days after the network paid $787 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which unearthed private text messages the host sent to colleagues about former President Trump and the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
In one of the messages, Carlson expressed anger about the violence that broke out at the Capitol, even as he dismissed the events of that day on his show as “mostly peaceful chaos” in the months that followed.
Watters has mounted a more scoffing and punchy persona during his rise at Fox, mocking what he often decries as out-of-touch Democrats like President Biden and trolling liberals on various culture issues like gender identity and race relations.
Watters’s ribbing of his fellow panelists on the hit show “The Five” has similarly become a familiar staple of the program’s daily flow, helping the table-talk debate program steadily climb the ratings ladder during his tenure.
As part of his current 7 p.m. show, his patented man-on-the-street interviews and on-air reading of viewer text messages show an effort to relate to his audience and appeal to their senses of humor, rather than play on their fears and political biases.
To be sure, Watters is unlikely to stray from Carlson’s GOP conservative-friendly politics. But the two hosts’ styles are not identical.
Watters will draw scrutiny from Fox’s biggest critics
Like Carlson, Watters has sparked controversy during his career at Fox.
In December 2021, Watters was speaking to a group of grassroots conservative activists when he suggested they ambush Fauci and go for a rhetorical “kill shot” to his credibility in the form of questions about a Chinese lab’s links to the coronavirus’s origins.
After Fauci called for Watters to be fired, the network defended its host and said his comments had been taken out of context.
A month later, Watters was given his first weekday solo show, and has since doubled down on some of his most controversial rhetoric about the pandemic and other issues.
Before he was taken off the air by Fox, Carlson’s segments were routinely panned by media watchdogs and Democrats.
Watters is likely to face the same scrutiny.
On Monday, as Fox announced Watters would replace Carlson at 8 p.m., the liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America sent out a press release blasting the decision and calling out some of Watters’s most controversial comments on race, gender, and other hot political topics.
Carlson often wore the criticism his show received as a badge of honor, so how Watters responds to the scrutiny he is sure to also receive will be something to watch as the lights around him get brighter.
Watters has, so far, shown a preference for Trump over DeSantis
A big question hanging over many top Fox News pundits this summer will be whether to back former President Trump or his chief political rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in the GOP primary.
Watters’s new 8 p.m. show will be bookended by shows hosted by Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, two of the former president’s biggest boosters in the media.
Watters has yet to explicitly say which of the two candidates he would rather see get the GOP nod, but there are signs he is still largely supportive of Trump.
Earlier this month, Watters suggested that he finds Trump to be a more formidable candidate, though he credited the Florida governor for having “the discipline” to stick with a strategy for months of “not counterpunching” Trump.
“He’s finally counterpunching and the counterpunches are strong,” Watters said of DeSantis on an episode of The Five earlier this month. “I respect the counters, but Donald Trump is wearing him down. And I’m curious to see the poll numbers of Ron DeSantis once he started counterpunching.”
Trump has railed against Fox over its coverage of DeSantis for months, and his allies have blasted the network for pulling Carlson, who was also vocally supportive of him, off the air.
Watters will notably feature an interview with DeSantis on his 7 p.m. program Thursday.
As the GOP primary heats up, how firmly Watters plants himself in Trump’s camp will go a long way toward showing what he believes will resonate with his audience as he looks to establish himself as a force on the political right ahead of the 2024 general election.
Network bets Watters can help retain viewership at 8 p.m.
Fox experienced a dip in ratings once Carlson’s show was canceled, as it used a rotating cast of fill-in hosts to anchor its 8 p.m. hour while seeking to settle on a permanent fixture.
Fox remains the most-watched network on cable, thanks largely to shows on which Watters is a central figure, such as “The Five” and “Jesse Watters Primetime.”
Yet the competition among the networks remains fierce, and the nightly crown is not guaranteed.
Nielsen Media Research data shows Fox narrowly beat out MSNBC during the month of June in prime time, notching an average of 1.4 million viewers compared to 1.3 million for the liberal network. Carlson’s program consistently raked in north of 2.5 million viewers while it was on the air.
With more viewers cutting cable and the 2024 election coming into focus, Fox wants to keep its status as the top-rated channel for political news and commentary. It thinks Watters will help them defend that crown.