Remember when Fox News was supposed to represent fearless conservatism on the cable dial? Well, yeah — so about that.
Last spring, the network indicated just how fearless it was in the modern era by ditching its top host, Tucker Carlson, while keeping him under contract so he couldn’t go anywhere else.
That didn’t work in two ways: First, Tucker continued his show on Twitter/X, all while still collecting checks from Fox and saying things the network didn’t like him saying.
Second, his replacement, Jesse Watters, has been OKish — funny but lacking the gravitas and conservative bona fides that Carlson has.
If you wanted a summation of everything that’s been wrong with Fox News since Carlson’s departure, in fact, you need only look at a social media post by the official X account of the other show on which Watters appears, “The Five,” on Wednesday evening.
It’s not so much what it said (“@JesseBWatters is ready for The Five! Are you?”) but rather what it showed:
.@JesseBWatters is ready for The Five! Are you? pic.twitter.com/cg4N9oqCek
— The Five (@TheFive) January 3, 2024
Did you spot it? Christina Pushaw, a top aide to GOP presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, did:
what’s the mask for?
— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) January 3, 2024
Yes, apparently, in the Year of our Lord 2024, at what’s supposed to be the right-leaning “alternative” to networks such as CNN and MSNBC, we have someone in the background still wearing a face diaper.
I thought — wrongly, as it turns out — that all but the staunchest of liberal virtue-signalers and those in ultra-high-risk groups had ditched them. Perhaps this individual is among the latter group — although, at this point, she’d be better off being in a hermetically sealed bubble, not on the set of “The Five.” Thus, one can assume she’s in with the former.
Pushaw wasn’t the only one who noticed this:
Just stop with the COVID theater, the mask isn’t even on correctly. 😕
— Jason_FLMAN🐊 (@jason_flman) January 3, 2024
Why the mask?
— Michael Perkins (@MchlDPerkins) January 3, 2024
does that chick in the background announce her pronouns at every meeting too?
— BowTiedReactionary (@bowtiedreact) January 3, 2024
Of course, this doesn’t help for another reason: The post came on the same day that Texas Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw responded to a piece Watters’ prime-time show ran earlier this week in which he tacitly accused Crenshaw of insider trading by essentially calling Watters a RINO and getting very, very personal.
Don’t get me wrong; insider trading among members of Congress is serious business, and Watters’ piece could, theoretically, have shined a light on it:
Our politicians crushed the market in 2023- smoking professional money managers who do this all day for a living. Some of them are even investing in companies they have inside information on.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what corruption looks like. And this is why Congress… pic.twitter.com/fdyXhBx5WS
— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) January 3, 2024
However, according to Mediaite, Crenshaw responded with Instagram Stories posts calling the report misleading, saying he had “$10,000 invested in stocks” — a relatively small amount for a member of Congress — and he hadn’t touched the stocks in “over a year.”
He then went on to call Watters, ahem, a “f***ing clown,” a “f***ing hack,” a “dirtbag millionaire,” a tool of the “political entertainment industry” and “such a ‘conservative’ he cheated on his wife and then left her with twins while he went off with another Fox producer.”
Do you still watch Fox News?
While it may sound like Watters touched a nerve, the congressman had a point when he veered into substantive territory; Watters’ alleged conservative bona fides are again undermined by the fact that, in 2017, his wife filed for divorce after discovering he had an affair with his 26-year-old assistant producer, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
One doesn’t know exactly what was going on behind the scenes in Watters’ marriage, but it’s not exactly something you would expect to see Tucker Carlson — or anyone calling himself a real “conservative” — doing.
In the same vein, you wouldn’t expect to see Tucker tolerating someone still masking up four years after COVID struck on his set — much less letting his show post a photo of the staffer in the background as if nothing were wrong.
Very disparate issues, yes, but two that point to a similar problem: To an extent that conservatives could ever trust Fox News, those days appear to have passed. Yes, Watters can be funny, and he can sound and act conservative. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Or masking or cheating, as the case may be.
