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

SATURDAY: We watched an array of Unrecognizables!

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2025

Telling this story is hard: At one point, the Harvard Law School graduate said it, though only perhaps in a dream:

I was never a D-minus student, but I play one on cable TV.

At one point, she may have said it. Last night, we were stunned by the manifest dumbness of the first twenty minutes of the Jesse Watters Primetime show. Then, this very morning, Fox & Friends Weekend offered a bit of self-revelation of an extraordinary sort.

As we told you long ago, it's all anthropology now. And as we've told you again and again, the major news orgs of Blue America refuse to report, discuss or critique the very strange behavior which occurs on Fox News Channel programs. 

Also this:

Even after he demolished one part of the White House, those heralded news orgs refused to ask this obvious question:

Is something wrong with this man? Why does he do these things?

If something is wrong with the person in question, that is, of course, a personal tragedy—a loss of human capability. And the evidence suggests that there isn't quite as much of that capability floating around as a person might once have thought.

We're going to stop to ponder now. Telling this story is very hard. Come Monday, where should we start?  

  

FRIDAY: The political landscape seems to have changed!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2025

We revisit that Times editorial: Online, the editorial appeared last Friday, along with goblins and ghosts. Today, with the political landscape changed, it seems like a high-minded visit from those who may now be numbered among the honored dead.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/31/opinion/trump-autocracy-democracy-report.html

Over here in Blue America, we thought the focus on "our democracy" was always a bit of a semantical non-starter. The endless complexification of our governmental processes is one of the unavoidable factors which have helped lend fuel to the Tea Party and MAGA movements.

We Blues have responded in the best ways we knew. Last Friday's lengthy editorial began in the following fashion:

ARE WE LOSING OUR DEMOCRACY?

Countries that slide from democracy toward autocracy tend to follow similar patterns. To measure what is happening in the United States, the Times editorial board has compiled a list of 12 markers of democratic erosion, with help from scholars who have studied this phenomenon. The sobering reality is that the United States has regressed, to different degrees, on all 12.

Our country is still not close to being a true autocracy, in the mold of Russia or China. But once countries begin taking steps away from democracy, the march often continues. We offer these 12 markers as a warning of how much Americans have already lost and how much more we still could lose.

We don't disagree with the basic thrust. That said, we'll guess that most citizens think of a "democracy" as a nation which holds elections—pretty much total full stop. It will be hard to convince such people that "our democracy" is being undone as long as candidates are out on the hustings and votes are being cast.

That said:

It seems to us that the votes which were cast this past Tuesday night have changed the basic shape of the political landscape. You can call it "our democracy," or you can call it "the basic American way of life"—but whatever it is you want to call it, it looks like citizens have come to believe that some sort of change is underway which they don't much seem to like.

MAGA leadership has thereby been put on notice. It remains to be seen what they will do to push back against this tide.

That said, the Times offered twelve "signs"—twelve signs that a fundamental, undesirable change seems to be underway. It now seems that the public has noticed some such phenomenon and is willing to turn out at the polls in hopes of defeating that process. This was the list of twelve signs the editors discussed in their piece:

The 12 signs

NO. 1
An authoritarian stifles dissent and speech. Trump has started to.

NO. 2
An authoritarian persecutes political opponents. Trump has.

NO. 3
An authoritarian bypasses the legislature. Trump has started to.

NO. 4
An authoritarian uses the military for domestic control. Trump has started to.

NO. 5
An authoritarian defies the courts. Trump has started to.

NO. 6
An authoritarian declares national emergencies on false pretenses. Trump has.  

NO. 7
An authoritarian vilifies marginalized groups. Trump has.

NO. 8
An authoritarian controls information and the news media. Trump has started to.

NO. 9
An authoritarian tries to take over universities. Trump has started to.

NO. 10
An authoritarian creates a cult of personality. Trump has.

NO. 11
An authoritarian uses power for personal profit. Trump has.

NO. 12
An authoritarian manipulates the law to stay in power. Trump has started to.

The editors discuss each of those points in the course of their long editorial. Personally, we don't think that angry accusation is the best or the only possible way to approach this rolling situation. But that's what the editors said.

For the record, there are citizens who will applaud President Trump for some of those behaviors. For example, it seems that there are plenty of people who feel, rightly or wrongly, that American universities have moved way off the rails.

That said:

The victory margins on Tuesday night suggest that we the voters have noticed some ch-ch-ch-changes of which we don't approve. That represents a major change in the weather, in the political landscape.

President Trump has, in fact, displayed a bit of an authoritarian instinct over the course of the years. Given that fact, how will he and his leadership cadre respond to this apparent change in the weather?

Fellow citizens, buckle up! With mid-term elections a year away, that very much remains to be seen.

CHAOS: Those gerrymanders may backfire next year!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2025

If next year actually happens: It isn't the fact that the Democratic candidates won. As we noted yesterday, it's the fact that they won by these margins:

New Jersey gubernatorial election, 2025
Mikie Sherrill (D): 1,805,244 (56.3%)
Jack Ciattarelli (R): 1,384,601 (43.1%)

Virginia gubernatorial election, 2025
Abigail Spanberger (D): 1,921,472 (57.2%)
Winsome Earle-Sears (R): 1,433,562 (42.6%)

Assuming that next year's elections proceed in a normal way—assuming that next year's midterms take place at all—those victory margins suggest that President Trump's low approval ratings may show up as bad vote totals for Republican candidates. 

Tuesday's election results suggest that there's a change in the air. We even direct you to the possibility voiced by Russell Berman in a new essay at The Atlantic, dual headline included:

‘None of This Is Good for Republicans’
Gerrymandering efforts look different after Election Day.

President Donald Trump’s gerrymandering war has never looked riskier for his party.

Prodded by Trump, Republicans earlier this year launched an audacious plan to entrench their congressional majority by redrawing House-district maps to squeeze out Democrats—anywhere and everywhere they could. The gambit was an exercise in political power and, coming outside of the traditional decennial redistricting process, without precedent in modern history.

Yet if Democrats feared not long ago that they would be locked out of a House majority, their decisive victories across the country [Tuesday] night have made them, arguably, the favorites heading into next year’s midterm elections.

[...]

“None of this is good for Republicans. It’s all their own doing, though,” [Mike] Madrid said. Latinos in Texas border towns may vote differently in 2026 than Latinos in New Jersey did this year. But the anti-GOP shift in this week’s elections could boost the Democrats’ chances of winning two and possibly three of the five Texas seats that Republicans redrew in their favor, Madrid told me. It could also open up even more opportunities for Democrats, because to create the additional red-leaning seats, Republicans had to cut into previously safe GOP districts. “The problem is they’re spreading their other districts thin as they’re getting greedy,” Madrid said.

Berman had spoken with Mike Madrid, "the longtime GOP strategist." As the leading authority notes, Madrid was once press secretary for the Republican leader of the California Assembly, though he later became a bit of a NeverTrumper.

In that passage, Berman is describing one of the ways the current redistricting efforts may backfire for the GOP in next year's House elections.

This potential problem was occasionally cited back when the redistricting war began. On Tuesday evening, the possibility of some such backfire occurring became more clear. 

Could Republican gerrymandering backfire? This is the way the backfire would happen, using the reconfigured House districts in Texas as a case in point:

The Texas legislature has created a bunch of new House districts. They were designed to create five additional districts which seemed to favor Republican candidates.

Having said that, sad! Those new Republican-friendly seats will only be Republican-friendly if Texas voters continue to turn out and vote the way they've done in the recent past. If sentiment among Texas voters begins to turn in the way which seemed to drive Tuesday evening's victory margins, it may turn out that some of those newly Republican-friendly districts won't turn to be Republican-friendly at all.

Given the possible change in voter sentiment, Madrid is suggesting that two or three of those five House districts in Texas may end up voting for the Democratic candidate next year. It's also true that, in order to create those newly Republican-friendly districts, some Republican voters were stolen away from other districts which were already Republican-friendly.

This creates the possibility that those other districts, which elected Republicans in the past, might slip out of the Republican camp as well. In other words:

In order to create five additional "red-leaning seats," Texas Republicans had to create some other districts which are now less red-leaning. If over voter sentiment changes, the GOP could imaginably lose some of those districts too.

So it could go in next year's elections, assuming those elections take place and if voter sentiment continues to turn against President Trump. 

So it could go next year! That said, it remains to be seen how the sitting president and his staff will react to the warning signs which appeared in Tuesday's elections. Things could get extremely hairy as we move through the coming year.

It isn't the fact the Democratic candidates won in Virginia and in New Jersey. It's the fact that those candidates won by such large margins.

How will the MAGA leadership cadre react to Tuesday night's results? We don't have the slightest idea, but that's a key part of the larger question.

Also, the Fox News Channel continues to do what it can to freeze its viewers in the pro-MAGA camp. Intellectual chaos spreads across the fruited plane as these efforts continue.

This afternoon: The New York Times lists "12 signs"

Tomorrow: As recently heard, though perhaps in a dream:

"I was never a D-minus student, but I play one on cable TV!"