It was the dawn of a new era in American cable news on Monday night, as Jesse Watters, the Fox News humorist turned star, formally ascended into the much-coveted 8pm slot vacated by the fired Tucker Carlson.
It was a big moment for Watters, who got his big break as a sort of comedy-sidekick to former Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, but any audience members expecting a departure in terms of content – some fresh topics, some exciting new ground – will have been disappointed.
Instead, in his big debut, Watters essentially performed a Carlson tribute act, complete with unsubstantiated allegations against Hunter Biden, some bashing of Anthony Fauci, and the obligatory attacks on trans people.
Standard Fox News fare, in other words, as the channel attempts to steady the ship following Carlson’s unceremonious booting from Fox News, allegedly at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, in April. For Watters, it’s the culmination of two decades’ work – some of it infamous – at Fox News.
The network had promised that the 45-year-old would bring his “fresh take on the major headlines of the day” to the vacant 8pm slot, but while Watters, with his signature sharp suit, big quiff and smirk, might differ stylistically from Carlson’s upset-man-at-the-country-club shtick, the substance of Jesse Watters Primetime was no major departure.
First was Hunter Biden, the long-standing bogeyman for Fox News hosts and viewers. On Monday, the attack on Joe Biden’s son, who has admitted to struggling with addiction, took the form of insinuating that Hunter might be responsible for the cocaine found at the White House last week.
“We’ve told you before, this was either a White House staffer or a close family member,” Watters said.
He added: “We hope Hunter’s not involved with the coke,” before bringing on Jordan Belfort, aka the actual Wolf of Wall Street, who Watters described as a “former cocaine addict” and who very much does believe that Hunter is involved with the coke.
“Obviously, I don’t know for sure,” Belfort said. “But here’s my theory. The obvious person to point to is Hunter Biden.”
Kayleigh McEnany, Watters’ Fox News colleague and Donald Trump’s fourth, and final, White House press secretary, had previously suggested there was “no way” Hunter Biden could be responsible, but Watters prodded Belfort along, asking whether he had seen “any suspicious activity out of Hunter”.
“I think if you had to look at someone there, I would think – and again, no proof here – that Hunter is the obvious culprit,” Belfort said.
Watters’ debut in the 8pm slot – traditionally the most-prestigious hour at a cable news channel – came as Fox News attempts to claw back viewers who ditched the network after Carlson left.
The channel averaged 1.42m primetime viewers in May, the first full month since Carlson’s departure, down 37% from the same month a year earlier. Some of those viewers appear to have headed to NewsMax, the right-wing channel whose viewership has more than doubled since Carlson left.
As Watters began his quest to lure back an audience, he continued to roll out some Fox News greatest hits, treating those watching to a retro attack on Anthony Fauci, who stepped down as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in December.
Fauci, who as America’s top public health official led the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, became a Carlson bete noire during the coronavirus outbreak, and Watters clearly shares a fascination with the expert.
“Taxpayers are still paying for Fauci’s security,” Watters said, claiming that documents obtained by his show revealed that Fauci was receiving a government security detail, despite no longer working for the government.
What went unsaid was the role rightwing media and politicians played in demonizing Fauci during the pandemic. Fauci received death threats – and the furore started by Watters when he suggested, in 2021, that people should “ambush” Anthony Fauci and “go in for the kill shot” by presenting the infectious diseases expert with conspiracy theories.
That wasn’t Watters’ first brush with controversy. It was in his role as O’Reilly’s underling that he first rose to wider attention in 2016, when he hosted a segment from New York City’s Chinatown.
In the video, denounced as “racist” by then New York mayor Bill de Blasio, Watters asked locals if he should bow to them, before he visited a martial arts studio and played with a set of nunchucks. The video was interspersed with clips of Mr Miyagi, a fictional Japanese character in the film The Karate Kid, and much of it was set to the song Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas.
On Monday, with Fauci and his mysteriously-required security detail handled, it was time for Watters to move on.
After interviewing a one-time trans-rights activist who now aims to “deprogram” trans children, Watters gave an unquestioning, acritical rundown of Robert F Kennedy’s conspiracy theory claims that Covid-19 was engineered to “attack Caucasians and Black people” while leaving “Ashkenazi Jews” relatively immune.
From then on, Watters was into the home stretch.
“Sharks are on the hunt this summer,” he told viewers, which allowed him to show a clip from the movie Jaws, before Watters continued the cinematography theme by claiming that the Disney movie Snow White and Seven Dwarves was “firing six of the seven dwarves”.
It was unclear whether Watters ran out of time, or just didn’t have much more information, but either way the audience will never know exactly what he meant, or how exactly a movie fires six dwarves, because he never mentioned it again.
Instead, Watters invested a lot of time on Joe Biden “spending $17m on an anti-racist hiking trail” in New Britain, Connecticut.
Like with his dwarves, Watters provided little to no information on this alleged expenditure, but a Google search reveals that New Britain and its neighboring Plainville received a combined $16.3m in August 2022 to complete the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail.
The Guardian could find no evidence of the effort being anti-racist in nature, nor of Biden personally overseeing the project, but the year-old story allowed Watters to send a Fox News dogsbody to New Britain to upset some local residents.
At the end of the show, Watters made a phone call to his mother who he described to viewers as “a democrat”. Longtime fans of Watters will recall that his mother, Anne Watters, was also part of a recurring segment during her son’s tenure on The Five called “Mom Texts,” in which the younger Watters read out text messages from his liberal and often concerned mom.
After Watters prodded his mother for feedback, she warned him: “Do not tumble into any conspiracy rabbit holes.”
If this was a co-planned attempt to throw shade at Carlson, who has never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, then it was very well done, because Watters’ mother continued:
“There really has been enough Biden bashing and the laptop is old. Perhaps you could suggest that your people take less interest, for example, in other people’s bodies, and talk about facts.”
Whether Watters takes that advice on board remains to be seen. On the evidence of his debut outing, however, it looks like his mother will be disappointed.
