Who is Jesse Watters, the host replacing Tucker Carlson on Fox News?
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Fox News has tapped Jesse Watters, a controversial conservative host, to fill the 8 p.m. slot left vacant by the firing of Tucker Carlson, whose ouster led to a decline in the network's viewership.
The prime-time shake-up promotes "Jesse Watters Primetime" from its 7 p.m. slot. In addition, Watters will continue appearing as a co-host on "The Five," the network's 5 p.m. panel show, Fox News announced. He will take up his new slot July 17.
Watters, 44, who joined Fox News in 2002 as a production assistant, made his name conducting man-on-the-street interviews for host Bill O'Reilly, who once held the 8 p.m. time slot. The host was pushed out in 2017 after revelations of a string of sexual harassment complaints against him.
Watters's popularity among Fox News viewers who were devoted to Carlson's rhetoric championing the conservative agenda and conspiracy theories will be tested when he takes over. Like Carlson, Watters has often been accused by critics of racism and xenophobia. Fox fired Carlson in April after private messages that were made public through a defamation lawsuit caused anger and embarrassment for executives, adding to a cascading list of concerns, The Washington Post has reported.
A report by Watters in 2013 for "The O'Reilly Factor" seemingly mocked immigrant taxi drivers in New York by juxtaposing their accents with movie characters. A 2016 segment from Chinatown was widely criticized for stereotyping and targeting an ethnic group.
On "The Five" in 2019, Watters claimed without evidence that female reporters sleep with sources "all the time," in reference to the disputed portrayal of a journalist in the movie "Richard Jewell."
And in 2021, Watters created an uproar for encouraging a conservative audience to "ambush" infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci with a rhetorical "kill shot" of pointed questions.
Fauci described his statement as "horrible" and called for him to be fired. The network defended Watters.
An outspoken supporter of Donald Trump, whom he once interviewed aboard Air Force One, Watters has defended the former president during his classified documents case and accused President Biden, without providing evidence, of trying to send Trump to jail.
Watters is also known for regularly reading aloud disappointed text messages from his liberal mother. "Enough. Think about how to make the world a better place," he read out in one show where she makes an appearance.
Picking Watters to replace Carlson was a "curious" choice, commentator Paul Waldman wrote for MSNBC, in which "the network seems to have chosen a replacement-level talker, hoping he's good enough not to drive viewers away."
Fox News is betting on its stable of already popular show hosts to stabilize the ship in prime time, CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy wrote in his Reliable Sources newsletter.
Watters is a Philadelphia native and graduated from Trinity College in Connecticut with a bachelor's degree in history. He weighed in on some of the country's biggest social debates in a book about his life, "How I Saved the World," and described the stark choice facing the nation as being "between all-American hamburgers and leftist Green New Deal breadlines."
He lives in New York with his wife, Emma, and a mini-poodle, Rookie.
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