Jesse Watters is an example. To quote Slate Magazine, “The most successful man on Fox News is almost the dumbest. This is not a coincidence. This is from the Slate series, “This is part of Sly as Fox, a short series about the perils of underestimating Fox News in 2024.”
Slate reports: “On Jesse Watters Primetime, the host’s glib punditry and C-students-run-the-world charisma take the spotlight; in his nightly opening monologue and the show’s subsequent interview segments, Watters seeks less to persuade than to jeer the liberal malefactors whose alleged misdeeds he is lazily exposing. “A night of anarchy on the West Coast, as ‘kaffiyeh antifa’ got their hands on more weapons than Zelensky” was his derisive, and confusing, intro to a recent segment on the Gaza protests at UCLA. Kaffiyeh antifa. Got ’em, Jesse!
“Watters relies on low-effort mockery and lazy analysis, delivered in a mellow tone, often paired with a mirthless laugh. It is the mean-spirited snort of the frat brother when he spies a man with long hair; the smarmy chuckle of the righteous prick, intent on mocking, rather than forgiving, all those who trespass against him—even and especially if those trespasses are purely imaginary ones.”
Watter’s place in Fox programming is part of the effort to undermine the 2024 election if Donald Trump doesn’t win. Per Slate in a separate article, “The question we should be asking, I think, is whether Fox News still has the ability to affect the election. . . . The answer to that question is yes. It seems evident that there are not enough rabid Donald Trump supporters to guarantee a Trump victory in November, just as there are not enough die-hard Biden supporters to ensure the incumbent president a second term. What this means is that the presidential election will once again come down to turnout and messaging and those voters in a handful of states who have somehow still not yet made up their minds.
You will notice that Fox News does not make a habit of poaching existing conservative media stars to anchor its programs. Fox prefers to create its own stars, like the mediocre Jesse Watters, and to cast people who wouldn’t have prominent careers were it not for the network, people who can be counted on to stay loyal and do what they’re supposed to do.
According to Media Matters, MAGA propagandists are priming their audiences to disbelieve the election results and take action in response. They keep viewers in a state of terror with incendiary warnings that Biden is a jack-booted dictator who is deliberately trying to endanger their families, ensuring that some fraction would seek his removal by any means necessary. They valorize the January 6 insurrectionists as honorable patriots who did what they thought was right and were smeared by the media and punished by “deep state” malefactors. They flood the right-wing information ecosystem with lies and conspiracy theories about Democrats tainting past election results.
And they have already begun warning that the 2024 election will be rife with election fraud — and that only such cheating could explain a Trump defeat.
