We're happy to see a slippery star...

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2024

...attracting some mainstream attention: We're happy to see the Fox News Channel star Jesse Watters attracting some mainstream attention.

In January 2022, Watters first became a primetime host at the Fox News Channel. He'd started as Bill O'Reilly's silly, inane man-in-the-street. Now he would be the host of a 7 p.m. weeknight show, Jesse Watters Primetime.

The more consequential promotion came seventeen months later. Here's the way the leading authority on Watters' career thumbnails his life and times and his series of ascensions:

Early life and education

Watters was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, son of Stephen Hapgood Watters, a teacher, and child psychologist Anne Purvis, daughter of Morton Bailey, Jr., publisher of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. His maternal great-grandfather was Morton Bailey, publisher of The Saturday Evening Post...

Watters grew up in the Germantown and then East Falls neighborhoods. He attended the William Penn Charter School through junior year, before moving with his family to Long Island, New York. In 2001, he graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, with a B.A. in history.

Career

After his graduation, Watters began work as a production assistant at Fox News. In 2003, he moved to the production staff of The O'Reilly Factor, and in 2004 he began to appear on air in segments of O'Reilly's show.

On June 11, 2014, Watters debuted on the Fox News show Outnumbered, later occasionally appearing as a guest co-host. On November 20, 2015, Watters debuted his own monthly Fox News program, Watters' World. While Watters is characterized as an "ambush journalist," Watters has said, "I try to make it enjoyable for the person I'm interviewing. ..."

In January 2017, Watters' World became a weekly show, airing Saturdays at 8 p.m. ET. In April 2017, Watters became a co-host of the roundtable series The Five.

[...]

After being one of several rotating fill-in hosts in the network's 7 PM time slot, it was announced on January 10, 2022 that Watters would become the permanent host of a new primetime show, titled Jesse Watters Primetime, which debuted on January 24, 2022. Watters' World ended on January 15, 2022, while Watters continues to be a co-host of The Five.

In June 2023, Fox News announced Watters as the permanent host of the network's 8 p.m. EST hour following the firing of Tucker Carlson.

We've omitted news of his New York Times number one best-selling book, How I Saved the World—a book which apparently attained that status, like other Fox books, through the auspices of bulk sales.

In our view, several key points seem to be lurking within that career thumbnail:

First, it looks to us like the Fox News Channel cultivates its "talent" with substantial care. 

The channel began to develop Greg Gutfeld through the creation of Red Eye, a 3 a.m. [sic] nightly show. Somewhat similarly, the channel began to develop Watters through the creation of Watters' World as a monthly show.

The most significant part of that thumbnail is its last component. After Tucker Carlson had cracked so much pottery that the channel had to send him away, the channel decided it was time to anchor its weeknight lineup with Watters in the 8 p.m. hole.

For today, we'll close with a question. What's in the waters at Trinity College, an institution which has somehow managed to produce Tucker Carlson and Jesse Watters? What's going on up there?

For the record, Watters is a very slippery performer who works behind a very slippery though highly refined persona. In recent weeks, his routinely ridiculous work has been critiqued, at some length, in separate profiles by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

We're glad to see those newspapers starting to play it that way. We've been calling for this sort of thing dating back at least twenty years. 

In the next day or two, we'll show you what has been written about the types of gong-show work which have emerged on this "news channel" from this dim-witted, watery world.

The Post and the Times have each gotten it right. Attention should be paid!