After a year of rotating guest hosts, Fox News Channel has found its new 7 p.m. host.
Fox News has tapped Jesse Watters as the permanent host of the hour, the company said Monday. Watters has been a co-host of The Five since 2017, and also hosts a weekend program called Watters’ World. Watters will remain a co-host of The Five, while the channel will look for a new show to replace his weekend program.
The conservative commentator started as a production assistant at Fox News, and first appeared on-air while working as a producer for Bill O’Reilly’s show The O’Reilly Factor. Watters would do man-on-the-street style interviews, often in the same style as Jay Leno’s Jaywalking bits. He also did ambush interviews, surprising unsuspecting news subjects with questioning on the street.
His comments and segments have often been controversial. Just last month Watters gave a speech at a conservative political conference that attendees should “ambush” Dr. Anthony Fauci with questions and “go in for the kill shot” by asking about a conspiracy theory on the origin of the novel coronavirus. Fox responded by saying that it was “more than clear that Jesse Watters was using a metaphor for asking hard-hitting questions.”
Fox News switched up its lineup a year ago, moving anchor Martha MacCallum out of the 7 p.m. hour and announcing a new opinion show called Fox News Primetime. That show had a number of rotating guests hosts in the year since, including Watters.
