SERVILE / DEFERENTIAL: Did the New York Times save the worst for last?

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2025

Marchese fails to report: Should Colby Covington, age 37, be on a primetime "cable news" show as a commentator?

There's no correct answer to that. But as to a separate question—what happens each night on the Gutfeld! show—we direct you to what occurred this past Thursday evening.

It wasn't just any Thursday evening—it was Thanksgiving evening! In a pre-taped introduction, Gutfeld sidekick Kat Timpf explained what we'd see on the show:

TIMPF (11/27/25): Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, and congrats on staying awake this late after all that food, football and fighting with your drunk uncle. Anyway, we have had some fantastic shows the past few months with some great guests, so let's take a look back at some of the best segments. Enjoy!

Groan! But after that hackneyed can of corn, the fantastic segments started to roll. The second segment came from the October 21 show. For better or worse, the lineup that night was this:

Gutfeld!: Tuesday, October 21, 2025
Tyrus: Former professional "wrestler"
Kat Timpf: D-list comedian
Greg Gutfeld: Host, Gutfeld!; co-host, The Five
Colby Covington: UFC mixed martial artist
Emily Compagno: Former head cheerleader, Oakland Raiders

With a panel like that, how much could go wrong? To see the rebroadcast segment in question, you can just click here.

On October 21, President Trump had discussed the recent demolition of the East Wing of the White House. He had included a brief, insinuative account of President Kennedy's alleged use of the White House swimming pool for sexual encounters with women who weren't his wife.

Those remarks were largely disappeared by major mainstream news orgs. After playing the tape of those comments, Gutfeld exulted over this account of the way President Kennedy had allegedly been "banging young ladies in the pool" as his worried wife allegedly listened to their voices from behind a closed door.

That's the way the outstanding segment started, but soon the attention turned to complaints about the destruction of the East Wing. Inevitably, the panelists couldn't imagine why "the liberals" would be concerned about this amazingly innocuous act by the magnificent President Trump.

Soon, Gutfeld threw to Covington, seeking his view of this matter. Covington is an outstanding athlete, and for all we know he may be the world's nicest person. But should he be a commentator on a primetime "cable news" program? This is what came next:

GUTFELD (10/21/25): So Colby, we're not paying for the remodeling—it's being handled privately. So why are the liberals so outraged?

COVINGTON: I mean, they're just outraged because they're outraged about anything, you know?

GUTFELD: Yeah.

COVINGTON: They're not—They're just despicable people and they hate America and they hate our country and they'd rather use tax dollars to fund, you know, DEI programs than renovating the White House.

So said the primetime analyst. "The liberals" are "just despicable people," he said. Also, "they hate America and they hate our country."

So said the MMA star, reinvented as a primetime analyst. He offered a stunningly sweeping condemnation—but in fairness to Covington, viewers of this very strange program had heard this sort of thing many times before.

Over the previous several months, the subject of Greg Gutfeld's opening "issues monologue" had routinely adopted this very form. The highly unusual TV host had railed, night after night, about the moral failings, writ extremely large, of "the left" or of "the Democrat [sic] Party."

Covington was merely reciting a standard script from this very unusual "cable news" program. On Thanksgiving evening, producers had chosen this as one of the greatest recent segments on this very strange "cable news" show.

Covington had gone for the blood. Compagno, Timpf and Tyrus chose to go for the venal, the coarse and the stupid. 

As you can see from watching the tape, Timpf seemed to think that a president acquires ownership of the White House upon his inauguration. He can do whatever he wants with his house, she aggressively said. When his turn came, the blowhard Tyrus conflated Obama's erection of a basketball backboard with Trump's demolition of one whole wing of the White House.

It fell to Compagno to go where this program's demons routinely take us. When Gutfeld praised the sitting president's ability to build a ballroom and run the nation at the same time, Compagno hurried down this well-traveled road:

GUTFELD: You know, Emily, I think the Democrats don't understand that Republicans, and Trump especially, can do multiple things ia day. They were so used to Biden maybe doing one thing a month...

COMPAGNO: Yes! And the only thing Biden did once a month was [BLEEP] his pants.

AUDIENCE: Applause, screams, whistles

What word had producers chosen to BLEEP? By practice, producers had been BLEEPing the word "sh*t," but they'd been letting "poop" go through.

In our view, this the shape of the garbage can from which the Gutfeld! cast crawls onto the set each night. That said, opinions different about this highly unusual journalistic conduct. 

Many people find this sort of thing refreshing—they think it's long overdue. Concerning such views, we'll only say this:

The Gutfeld! show (along with its second cousins) has engineered a major change in the culture of American "journalism." Nothing could possibly be more clear—but majors news orgs like the New York Times refuse to report and discuss this key fact.

A string of profiles have appeared this year—profiles of this very unusual "news" show. In September, then again in October, the New York Times published two such works.

Did the Times save the worst of this year's profiles for last? The refusal to report the actual contents of this show—its sheer stupidity, its coarseness and its apparent misogyny—have never been quite so clear as in that last imitation of life.

How the profile started:

The only thing President Biden did was sh*t in his pants, the analyst said. The studio audience loudly cheered. 

This had been a standard theme of this show for several years.

Now it fell to the New York Times' David Marchese to offer a profile of this primetime show, which boasts a very large viewership. As we noted a few weeks ago, Marchese started with what looked like an act of deception—and an act of pitiful deference to the Fox News Channel. 

The profile appeared in the Sunday New York Times magazine. This is the way it started, headlines included:

The Interview
Fox News Wanted Greg Gutfeld to Do This Interview. He Wasn’t So Sure.

Why can’t conservatives break through on late-night TV? For years, that was an open cultural question. The left, of course, had “The Daily Show” and “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” among others. Once the Trump era began, progressives could also point to hosts like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers as being politically simpatico. The right had, well, no one.

That is, until Greg Gutfeld. Formerly a health and men’s magazine editor, Gutfeld joined Fox News in 2007 to helm the later-than-late-night chat free-for-all “Red Eye.” He worked his way up the network’s schedule, and in 2021 his new show, “Gutfeld!” started airing on weekday nights at 11 p.m. on the East Coast. (It’s now on at 10 p.m.) Its format is different from traditional host-driven late-night shows: Rather than interview celebrity guests, Gutfeld presides over a round table of regular panelists, among them the former professional wrestler Tyrus and the commentator Kat Timpf, the designated (occasional) contrarian. The overall vibe is insult-heavy, aggressively anti-woke and relentlessly pro-conservative. It’s a successful formula. The show averages over three million viewers a night — numbers that dwarf its competitors’.

So Gutfeld, who is also a host of the daytime show “The Five” alongside Dana Perino and Jesse Watters, can now credibly lay claim to the title “king of late night.” (Also the name of his 2023 nonfiction book.) 

In that opening passage, Marchese hailed Gutfeld as the "king of late night." e did so even though he clearly knew that Gutfeld! isn't a late night program. (Key words: 10 p.m., on the East Coast.)

It's a branding boast from Gutfeld's own book. Marchese hails it, knowing it isn't true. 

Why would a major journo do that? We'll only guess that major orgs like the New York Times don't want to get in a fight with the aggressive poison of Fox.

The question of the misogyny:

Is misogyny found on the Gutfeld! show? As Marchese continued, he seemed to be aware of the possible problem.

He also seemed to know who the targets have been—but he, or perhaps some timorous editor, kept his critique quite vague. 

In this next exchange, Marchese referred to insults Gutfeld had directed at people like Kimmel and Fallin—at the people who do have "late night comedy shows." But then, with respect to Gutfeld's insults aimed at a separate group of targets, he went with this bowl of imprecise mush:

MARCHESE: You described their shows as being therapy sessions for people who are mad at the world. Is there not a way in which your show functions similarly?

GUTFELD: Oh, no. Our show is fun.

MARCHESE: You can be fun and mad at the same time.

GUTFELD: You can. But generally, I like to be part of the punching bag, and I encourage that among the guests. The teasing makes it fun. And also I genuinely like people that I tease. In fact, if you want to know the people I don’t like, it’s the people that I don’t tease.

MARCHESE: So you must love the women of “The View.”

GUTFELD: Yes! I love Whoopi.

MARCHESE: You must be a big fan of Rosie O’Donnell?

I put the people I don’t know in a different kind of room, but I make fun of everybody that I love, and relentlessly.

Evasively, Gutfeld continued from there. That said, the evasion wasn't hard to achieve in the face of Marchese's challenges. 

Marchese plainly seemed to know that the women of The View play a key role in the tsunami of swill which sweeps across the stage during this primetime program. He seemed to know that Rosie O'Donnell—and her (novelized) gynecologist—has been a similar target of Gutfeld's "conservative insult cuylture." 

That said, readers of the interview were never told why Marchese was citing those women—what makes them stand out from the crowd. Marchese was now engaged in the refusal to report—in the refusal to tell Times readers about the steady stream of insults in which those six women are compared to horses, to cattle, to cows, to dogs, to "livestock" or even to whales.

Readers weren't told about the insults, nor were the insults quoted. Also, readers weren't told about the endless complaints about Nancy Pelosi's ugly face, which has supposedly undergone way too many face lifts. 

(You can see one such reference in that featured segment from October 21—the excellent segment the program's producers decided to air once again.)

Why did Marchese mention "the women of The View?" Why did he mention O'Donnell? As Gutfeld slithered away, Marchese weirdly failed to explain. To our eye, this reads like deference to the Fox News Channel of an astonishing kind.

Gutfeld pretended it's all in good fun. Does he really believe that? Read on.

"The hierarchy of smears" [sic]:

How dumb does it get in the world of Greg Gutfeld? After an additional dose of evasion, consider where this very unusual "cable news" host decided to take things next.

Marchese wanted to know if Gutfeld maintains any animosity toward people like Kimmel and Fallin. Eventually, we were told about this very strange person's "hierarchy of smears:"

MARCHESE: Do you actually see Kimmel, Colbert and Fallon as competition?

GUTFELD: Not really.

MARCHESE: But you do seem to need them as foils.

GUTFELD: Yes, absolutely. In fact, I know myself enough to know that I need foils.

MARCHESE: Why?

GUTFELD: When I was in men’s magazines, my foils were Esquire, GQ, Details. I made fun of them all the time. It helps sharpen my identity, and it reminds me of what I am, which is: not them.

MARCHESE: Is there any actual animosity there?

GUTFELD: No.

There's no animosity there, he explained. Then, he explained this apparent insult:

(Continuing directly)
MARCHESE: You called Colbert a “smug loser” or something like that. And the one that stood out for me about Kimmel was: “If that man was any more full of [expletive], he’d be a colostomy bag.”

GUTFELD: I have this thing called the hierarchy of smears, and that means if you call somebody a fascist who’s going to destroy the world, I can call you anything. I made this point in an article by The New York Times on Kat Timpf, but they didn’t include it, which bummed me out. The writer was in the “Gutfeld!” audience, and she said: “During the show, you made all of these fat jokes—there were so many of them. And I’m sitting in your audience and, you know, there’s some overweight people.” And I said, “Yeah, but they didn’t call me Hitler.” That’s the difference. It goes back to that framing: I think you’re wrong; you think I’m evil. And I’m never going to call somebody fat because they’re fat. I’m going to call you fat if you called me Hitler. And the best part about that is it hurts them. It hurts them more than if they were to call me Hitler because they have to look in the mirror every day. I know I’m not Hitler. They know they’re fat.

Presumably, that's what he said. You'll have to take our word for this as we try to "explain."

Gutfeld has been explaining this "hierarchy of smears" dor at least several years now. The "thinking" goes like this:

If Person A calls Person B a "fascist" or says that Person B is "Hitler," that can get Person B killed. But no one gets murderously mad at someone just for being too fat.

In this way, a hierarchy is created—admittedly, a hierarchy of smears. It's OK for Gutfeld to call people fat because it won't result in their getting killed.

Gutfeld has been offering this theory for years. Within the context of his constant attacks on 83-year-old women like Joy Behar, it ignores the lesser harm that can be done within a society by an endless onslaught of apparently misogynistic "smears."

We refer to the smears in which women are referred to as dogs—as cattle and cows and as "livestock." 

We refer to the smears in which liberal women are insulted that way, night after night, on this remarkably stupid show. 

In fairness, it could be that this emotionally peculiar man is so drenched in some variant of the angry woman-hating of the modern-day "incel" culture that it has never crossed his mind that referring to women as cows and cattle and pigs and dogs can convey societal harm. Let's assume it doesn't get anyone killed. It's still a cancer on the society and on the culture.

For the record, Gutfeld also spends mountains of time on his crackpot program insisting that no one in the MAGA camp ever calls liberals anything that could imaginably get them killed. In this way, he skips past the sitting president toward whom he's been said to be servile—the sitting president who makes constant reference to "Communist lunatics," and of course to "traitors," pretty much every day of the week.

Marchese mentioned none of this. As a bit of comic relief, this point did come up:

MARCHESE: I think you’re being a little disingenuous.

GUTFELD: Am I really?

MARCHESE: I read all your books. The most blatant counterexample to what you’re talking about is, you literally use the phrase: “The left are dumb fascist mothereffers.”

GUTFELD: What book was that?

MARCHESE: Your most recent one, “The King of Late Night.”

GUTFELD: I’ll have to look back at that. What was the context?

MARCHESE: The left.

GUTFELD: Who was I talking about?

MARCHESE: The left. It was a blanket statement.

GUTFELD: I don’t remember the specific context. Was it part of some kind of amplifying narrative?.

The nut-ball slithered on from there. He couldn't remember saying some such thing. Was it part of "some kind of amplifying narrative?" Was some lofty explication involved?

A second bite at the apple:

In comments to this pseudo-interview, many readers of the Times said they'd never previously heard of Greg Gutfeld. They didn't know that he has a large viewership. They didn't know what he does.

After reading the interview, they still had no idea what he says and does on his (primetime) "cable news" show, because Marchese refused to report—refused to quote—the bulk of the things Gutfeld says.

On this campus, we're most amazed by the way the profiles of the mainstream press refuse to confront or challenge this apparent "misogyny" problem. Why did Marchese mention the women of The View? Why did he mention O'Donnell? 

Marchese seemed to know where that particular problem lurks. But he refused to quote the things that get said, on a regular basis, on this poisonous, low-IQ show. 

New York Times readers were hustled again. He offered some quotes from Gutfeld's books. The relentless insults aimed at the horses and cows went undescribed, undefined.

(Why do we say they were hustled again? In a previous profile in the Times, Amanda ess seemed to position Kat Timpf as a feminist foil to Gutfeld. We have never seen Timpf push back against the apparent misogyny which suffuses this show. In that and in one or two other ways, she almost strikes us as more comically disingenuous than the seemingly woman-hating host she faithfully serves

At any rate, Marchese came back for a second bite of the apple.

"Gutfeld and I spoke again the following week," he eventually says. When they did, this was his first question:

MARCHESE: Earlier you expressed this idea that a lot of damage has been done in the country as a result of what you called amplified narratives: politically oriented repetition, persuasion, kind of brainwashing. Help me understand how it’s not at least a little bit hypocritical to say that. Because even if it’s nominally comedy that you’re doing on “Gutfeld!” you’re repeating the same ideas over and over again. Which are, basically, that the idiots on the left are ruining the country. So how are you not part of the problem that you’re diagnosing?

For starters, we have to say no. Except "nominally," the Gutfeld! program actually isn't a "comedy" show. It's a propaganda messaging program hiding behind the beard of comedy stylings.

To his credit (or to his discredit), Marchese seems to understand the messaging that this program is persistently selling. It's the profit-centered, corporate messaging which Covington knew how to echo:

COVINGTON: [The liberals] are just despicable people and they hate America and they hate our country

As Marchese seemed to know, that message is broadcast night after night. This is not a comedy show. It's a very stupid, poisonous messaging show of a very unusual kind.

It's a corporate messaging show with a very strong dose of woman hatred, and with material which is more coarse than anything ever seen on American news broadcasts. Is Hunter Buden banging or BLEEPing Jill Biden yet? as we noted in Wednesday's report, we saw Gutfeld raise that question three separate times last year.

This past year, one mainstream profile after another has agreed to play the fool for Gutfeld and the Gutfeld! program. He's a "prankster" providing "smart, clean comedy"—except that isn't what happens on Gutfeld! at all. 

Why won't the New York Times say so?

They refuse to quote what Gutfeld says on his show. They pretend it's a comedy program. Most amazingly, they keep attempting to airbrush the apparent misogyny away.

Gutfeld is servile to Trump, one scribe said in one profile. Is the New York Times secretly servile to the Fox News Channel? Is the New York Times deathly afraid to trigger a tussle with this powerful org?

We have one last question to ask: Does our own Blue America possess any kind of a sexual politics? 

Some people love the Gutfeld! show. Based on audience cheering, they especially love the ugly insults this little nut throws at waves of 80-year-old liberal women night after night after night.

Why does this little nut-ball do that? You'd almost think that inquiring journalistic minds would want to know.

Many people loves the Gutfeld! show. We see it as a cancer on the culture.

Of one thing there can be no doubt. Gutfeld! and The Five represent a major change in the culture of American journalism. That important fact needs to be reported and discussed.

Each night, five flyweights are gathered on a set to emit angry MAGA agitprop. MMA stars hold forth about the manifest evil found among the others.

President Biden keeps sh*tting his pants. The women of The View are a group of dogs or whales, or possibly cows or "livestock." 

Hunter Biden may be banging or BLEEPing the first lady. The unfortunate fury of incel culture never seems all that distant.

In the face of this mammoth assault on prevailing journalistic culture, Blue America's hapless elites seem to be running empty and scared. This is the rancid, dishonest business our Blue elites have apparently chosen.

Until we have reason to think something else, we score Covington as a good, decent person. But should MMA stars be commentators on primetime American "cable news" programs? 

And how about Greg Gutfeld himself? His behavior is very unusual. Why won't our own Blue orgs report what he does and says?

Over the past several years, profiles of Gutfeld have eeeun off and his. In our view, he needs and deserves to get some help. But what explains thevrefusal of the New York Times to come to terms with the remarable transgressons of this show and of its companion, The Fibe?