What will Greg Gutfeld do at Fox News Channel as its cable ratings tank now that Tucker Carlson is gone? Speaking to the Wall Street Journal about his future plans, Gutfeld said that he is considering leaving both “Gutfeld” and “The Five” to fill Tucker’s old slot.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal about taking over Tucker’s old slot, Gutfeld said, “Obviously, it’s crossed my mind.” Continuing, he added that if he did take over the slot he would have to change around his schedule and stop doing the other shows to make room for it.
“If I did 8 o’clock, I would definitely not do The Five, and I would no longer do Gutfeld! Those just happen to be the two most popular shows on Fox these days. I would just do one show because I would prepare for that show like crazy,” he said.
While many online thought that a Tucker-style show wouldn’t fit Gutfeld, who is known more for his sense of humor and entertaining content than investigations into government misdeeds, Gutfeld’s executive producer for “Gutfeld!” said he thought Gutfeld would be an excellent fit for the 8 pm slot.
“I think he could probably be successful in any of the timeslots. I mean, we were on at 3 in the morning East Coast time when we did ‘Red Eye,’ and people found us,” he said.
Gutfeld has recently taken a stronger stance on some culture war issues, perhaps to set himself up for the 8 pm slot. For example, he recently tore into the trans issue, particularly the trans shooter in Nashville and the now-infamous University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas.
Speaking on that, he said, “I keep asking myself, ‘Have we reached peak trans yet?’ They’ve got swimsuits, the cover of the swimsuit issue. You got pop singers and track stars and swimmers, and now even mass shooters. So they are now as American as you can get, which means, like the rest of us, they got a target on their back. It’s called humor. They should embrace it.”
Whatever Gutfeld’s ultimate decision on the 8 pm vs. “Gutfeld!” and “The Five,” it seems unlikely to stymie Fox News Channel’s massive losses in viewership. Cable news was already falling out of popularity, particularly among younger people, and so it will be hard for the network to win back the millions of former viewers that it lost by firing Tucker and parting ways with Bongino.
In fact, the network has already bled so many viewers that now it’s not even the most-watched prime-time cable news show. MSNBC beat it out recently for the first time in five years, ending FNC’s nearly half-decade-long spot in the lead. As not much else has changed at the network since its cable ratings fell off a cliff in May, it seems likely that Tucker’s firing is why people stopped tuning in to watch it. Instead, they and tens of millions of others are watching Tucker’s Twitter videos while a few remaining people stick around to watch Fox.
Featured image credit: By Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America – Greg Gutfeld, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115135174
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