I can hardly believe this, but it appears that Tucker and Hannity are on the run from … Greg Gutfield:
Is the former editor of Stuff magazine who used to host a 3 a.m. talk show now poised to become a top dog at Fox News? If recent viewership numbers are any indication, that may just be the case.
Greg Gutfeld, the 57-year-old self-described “libertarian” known for his right-wing humor and increasingly hostile politics, currently hosts two of the most-watched shows on cable news.
In the process, Gutfeld has played a key role in relegating Sean Hannity—whose name was once synonymous with Fox News—to third-place status at the network. And he is seemingly on the verge of overtaking Tucker Carlson as the king of Fox News ratings, even though both of his programs sit outside of the highly viewed weeknight primetime hours.
Between the recent ratings victories of The Five and the high viewership numbers of Gutfeld’s eponymous late-night talk show, the former Red Eye host is a Fox News juggernaut.
Since this past summer, The Five—the late-afternoon talk show Gutfeld has co-hosted since the program’s debut in 2011—has overtaken Hannity’s eponymous 9 p.m. as the second-most-watched show in all of cable news. At the same time, the show has nipped at Tucker Carlson Tonight’s heels, at one point surpassing the primetime star in October as cable’s most-viewed program. (In fact, for both the month of December and the final quarter of the year, The Five actually placed first in total viewership, topping Carlson by a slim 6,000 viewers in the final quarter of 2021.)
Hannity was king during the Trump years and Carlson has since become a juggernaut at the network. Throughout Gutfeld was slowly climbing to the top:
Over the past few years, he has transformed from irreverent satirist to acerbic ideologue, spending much of the Trump years actively boosting and rooting for the then-president while basking in the TV-addicted president’s adulation.
But much like Carlson, Gutfeld’s MAGA adjacency never became his overarching identity. In a post-Trump world, in which Fox News has pivoted to culture-war grievances, right-wing outrage bait, and incessant anti-Bidenism, Gutfeld’s broad ideology of being decidedly anti-liberal has undoubtedly helped elevate his profile. Meanwhile, Hannity, whose wagon was firmly hitched to all things Trump fandom, has struggled for an identity.
By the 2020 election, the Gutfeld-led daytime talk show The Five already rose to third place in Fox News viewership, supplanting Laura Ingraham, another Fox host whose identity seems firmly attached to Trump’s. For the first half of 2021, Hannity was able to hold off Gutfeld & Co. from taking the No. 2 slot—but only barely.
As 2021 dragged on, Gutfeld’s stock only continued to rise at Fox.
He was awarded his own nightly 11 p.m. broadcast as part of Fox’s effort to ditch more of its “straight news” broadcasts for opinion programming. Debuting in April, the “comedy” hour, titled Gutfeld!, replaced Fox News @ Night—which was pushed to midnight—and immediately became a hit, easily accruing the most viewership for its cable timeslot and eventually besting most of the broadcast networks’ late-night talk shows.
The late-night show consistently remained in the top 10 of all cable news programs, pulling in an average of nearly 2 million viewers in November. And despite comedians and reviews initially panning the show’s attempts at right-wing humor, Gutfeld soaked in the praises of fellow anti-”woke” panel host Bill Maher.
Gutfeld also cemented his status as the dominant presence on The Five. His clout at the network and within the panel program has been apparent not just on camera, but behind the scenes when he reportedly played a part in getting liberal colleague Juan Williams booted from the show. (Fox News has denied this was the case.) By the end of the year, Gutfeld seemed to drive most of the headlines generated by the 5 p.m. gabfest.
Hannity’s fallen far behind and now it looks like it’s a cage match between Gutfeld and Carlson. Might as well throw two poisonous snakes into a bucket and let them fight it out.
What a race to the bottom. I can’t even begin to understand the attraction to either of those guys. Tucker Carlson has an ideology and an agenda and they’re very dangerous. Gutfeld is a nasty piece of work and not a benign influence by any means, but I don’t think he’s a neo-fascist true believer as Tucker is.
This is what it’s come to. A nazi or a troll, pick your poison.