Jesse Watters made a remarkable prediction that Americans would stage a revolution if Fox News was ever taken off the air.
Mr Watters boasted about the importance of his home network on The Five programme on Thursday, saying: “There’s only two items that if you took it off TV, there’d be a revolution in this country: football and Fox News.
“You can take anything else off television, cable, or broadcast, and the country stays the same. If you remove college and pro football and this channel, this country would not tolerate it.
The clip went viral on X/Twitter, inviting a wave of backlash.
Under a clip tweeted by Daily Beast reporter Justin Baragona, one user said: “We should try that (with Faux News) and see what happens!” Another user tweeted that they think “he meant celebration in this country” rather than a revolution.
Mr Watters’ declaration came at the end of a segment where the panellists were criticising a new podcast Strike Force Five, in which five late-night show hosts are releasing episodes to raise money to pay their workers during the ongoing writers’ strike.
The panellists were complaining about the late-night hosts being “anti-American” for not competing with each other.
Mr Watters dismisses the hosts’ attempts to stay relevant and calls them “non-essential workers” going on to say the only two items that are essential are “football and Fox News”.
Jesse Watters has become the most recent permanent member of The Five after Tucker Carlson was fired— (Fox News)
According to Forbes, NFL football garnered around 16.7 million viewers in 2022.
As of August 2023, Fox News is one of the “big three” cable TV news channels in the United States, with 2.03 million primetime viewers, according to Adweek. Yet the other 329.87 million citizens in the US may be wondering what the others are rioting about if Fox News left the air.
Mr Watters recently became a permanent primetime fixture after host Tucker Carlson was fired back in April, allegedly for racist views shared amid a lawsuit Fox News was settling with Dominion Voting Systems.
