THE DISAPPEARED: The New York Times has discovered Greg Gutfeld!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2025

His conduct still gets disappeared: The battle over the government shutdown—the battle over food assistance; the battle over affordable health care—is taking place within a larger context.

We refer to the nation's political discourse, or perhaps to its imitation of same. We've often told you this:

It's relatively easy to be aware of the various things which get reported and said. It can be extremely hard to be aware of the many things which get disappeared.

Many things do get disappeared within the American discourse. Having offered that tantalizing suggestion, we start our week with this:

Viewership numbers for cable news programs are now available for the month of October. Below, you see the way the Nielsen numbers looked last month for the fifteen most watched "cable news" programs.

The numbers represent the average audience for the particular program. For the full report from Adweek, you can just click here:

Here Are the Cable News Ratings for October 2025 / Total viewers
1. The Five, Fox News: 3.7 million
2. Jesse Watters Primetime, Fox News: 3.1 million
3. Gutfeld!, Fox News: 2.8 million
4. Special Report with Bret Baier, Fox News: 2.8 million
5. Hannity, Fox News: 2.6 million
6. The Ingraham Angle, Fox News: 2.6 million
7. The Will Cain Show, Fox News: 2.2 million
8. Outnumbered, Fox News: 2.0 million
9. America’s Newsroom, Fox News: 2.0 million
10. The Faulkner Focus, Fox News: 1.9 million
11. The Story with Martha MacCallum, Fox News: 1.9 million
12. America Reports, Fox News: 1.9 million
13. The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC: 1.6 million
14. Fox News @Night, Fox News: 1.5 million
15. Fox & Friends, Fox News: 1.3 million

You are correct, sir! Among October's most-watched "cable news" programs, fourteen of the top fifteen aired on the Fox News Channel.

(Just so you'll know, CNN's most-watched program was The Arena with Kasie Hunt. Airing at 4 p.m. Eastern, it averaged 611,000 viewers.)

To what extent do these three channels shape the American discourse? That would be hard to determine. But for better or worse, there is no doubt that the Fox News Channel dominates this competition. Across the sweep of the full day, it had three times as many viewers as MSNBC during the month just passed, almost four times as many as CNN.

The Fox News Channel rules the seas and has done so for years! For better or worse, the New York Times has started reacting to that fact, with special attention being paid to that channel's Greg Gutfeld and his band of merry men and women.

To its credit, the New York Times didn't pull Gutfeld's name out of a hat. Along with his towel-snapping pal Jesse Watters, Gutfeld dominates the pseudo-discussions on The Five, where the two lads serve as regular co-hosts. 

On that most-watched program of them all, this pair of potentates tend to split the "interruption of Tarlov" duties, a key part of the program's tribally pleasing frisson. Gutfeld tends to dominate the attempt at conducting something resembling real discussion with the long filibusters in which he delivers his attempts at constructing coherent political theories.

That horseplay plus disquisition performance occurs each day at 5 p.m. Eastern. Three hours later, Watters hosts his own nightly show—the second most-watched TV show in all of cable news.

Gutfeld's eponymous program follows two hours later. 

Due to this double-dipping, Watters is seen by more people, on a nightly basis, than anyone else in cable news. Gutfeld runs a close second. 

Presumably, this helps explain why the New York Times has now featured Gutfeld and his eponymous Gutfeld! show in two large recent profiles. The latest such profile, written by David Marchese, starts off exactly like this, headline 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’.

That's the way the profile starts. In certain fairly obvious ways, it goes downhill from there.

In other ways, this profile, which takes the form of an interview, can be seen as extremely revealing. The piece appeared online this weekend. It's scheduled to appear next Sunday in the New York Times magazine.

Gutfeld and Watters play prominent roles within the "cable news" industry. Arguably, they've now become the two biggest stars at the dominant Fox News Channel. 

That said:

As we've noted again and again, publications like the New York Times rarely report or discuss what happens on that channel's programs. In that way, the highly unusual content of those TV programs tends to get disappeared.

What does happen on the programs of the Fox News Channel? Last Saturday morning, on Fox & Friends Weekend, we saw a conversation between Rachel, Charlie and Griff which we thought should be reported. We'll start with that three-way exchange tomorrow morning, after which we'll move along to the way Marchese chose to interview Gutfeld—to the basic facts Marchese reported, but also to the basic facts he apparently chose to suppress.

We'll also look at the ludicrous ways Gutfeld answered Marchese's interview questions. At the age of 61, and with Tucker Carlson excepted, Gutfeld may be the strangest person who has ever played a major role on American "cable news."

That said, his disordered behavior has shot this man to the top of the "cable news" pile. Then too, there's the disorder displayed by Marchese himself—or perhaps by his editors—in the things he chose to report about Gutfeld's behavior, but also in the things he chose to suppress.

Stating the obvious, the New York Times is a very important newspaper. We readers are told many things about this world by the New York Times. Other important parts of our struggling nation tend to get disappeared.

For whatever reason, the New York Times has started to talk about Gutfeld. In comments to the Marchese interview / profile, many readers say they'd never heard of Gutfeld until this profile appeared.

Gutfeld and his eponymous program have now been the subject of two lengthy pieces in the Times in the past few months. For whatever reason, the paper still refuses to report what his strange man says and does.

The Fox News Channel rules the waves at the present time. For reasons we can't explain, Blue American orgs like the New York Times still aren't willing to take their customers on that particular sea cruise.

Tomorrow: Fox & Friends Weekend goes off