CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Cool: Greg Gutfeld has risen to the top at Fox News  Mon Jan 10, 2022 9:18 pm | |
| NEW YORK — Greg Gutfeld is picking through a long, narrow closet. He wrenches a painting from the depth of the clutter. A painting of himself. That familiar arched right eyebrow. That sideways grin. But most important, a saggy, bloodshot left eye.
The caricature, which had served as decoration in a Fox News Channel green room, is an homage to his bygone show, “Red Eye.” It was a subversive, periodically hilarious, reliably sophomoric program he hosted from 2007 until 2015, airing variously at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. on weekdays and 11 p.m. on Saturdays, on a most unlikely venue: Fox News Channel at its most self-righteous.
Someone keeps taking down the painting from a spot on the wall between two unisex bathrooms and replacing it with a framed poster celebrating the 25th anniversary of the network in 2021. Gutfeld keeps sneaking it back up.
This little game — reminding everyone of a show he left years ago at the expense of something more corporate and institutional — delights the 57-year-old Fox News star. He considers himself the scamp in a still buttoned-up bastion of scolding conservatism — the disruptive court jester, the fool. “Red Eye” made him something of a cult figure, a performer with street cred in a heavily left-leaning New York comic scene.
Underground acclaim as a television comedic host has given way to more traditional right-wing fame as he’s become a superfan of former president Donald Trump, a scorching critic of America’s racial reckoning following high-profile police shootings of Black men, and leaned harder into the Democrat-bashing that characterizes Fox News. After years on “The Five,” an ensemble show he co-hosts, he’s become even a bigger part of the dominant news network’s success as the host of a late-night comedy program that debuted in April — “Gutfeld!” Defying predictions, “Gutfeld!” is regularly generating higher ratings than more established late-night fare, such as “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon,” and has at times even topped “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
His combined viewership on the two programs — “The Five” and “Gutfeld!” — soared to an average of more than 5 million per day in the fourth quarter of 2021. It’s quite a feat for an edgy former men’s magazine editor who finds himself at a network populated by some of the biggest and most enduring figures in the conservative media pantheon.
Other marquee names at the network, such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, may have a larger overall reach because of their presence on additional platforms, such as radio or the network’s streaming service. Still, in a matter of months Gutfeld’s new program has made him significantly more influential — well-positioned to aid the right-wing in amplifying its agenda going into the midterms and the next presidential election. His fidgety, high-energy combination of comic jabs, spliced with just enough analysis to be taken seriously by the faithful, makes him a uniquely potent foe for the left.
Far from mimicking the deadly serious voice of Fox News stalwarts, such as Hannity, Carlson and Laura Ingraham, “Gutfeld!,” which airs weeknights at 11 p.m. on the East Coast, is banging many of the same topics, but with an irreverent tone.
With each quip and each tick up in the ratings, he’s leading an incremental evolution to a slightly looser on-air vibe at Fox News as it celebrates its 20th straight year as the most watched cable news network this month. “When I join things, it’s not to become whatever they are — it’s so that maybe they become a little bit more like me,” Gutfeld says in an interview.
In Gutfeld’s America, President Biden is a doddering geezer. The mainstream media is essentially a house organ for the left. And the nation isn’t engaged in a necessary national conversation on race, and racial disparities in housing, health care and employment. Instead, he aims to persuade his audience that the nation is consumed by destructive and divisive “reverse racism” and an insidious campaign against Whites.
He tempers the drumbeat with a tad bit of countervailing commentary, including his advocacy for drug legalization and ending the war on drugs.
“I have a lot more in common with liberals in terms of creativity, music and all that stuff — Republicans are always seen as staid and stodgy,” says Gutfeld, a punk-rock and metal fan who was delighted that he got splashed with blood not long ago at a performance by the heavy-metal monster band GWAR.
.https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/greg-gutfeld-fox-news/2022/01/09/5318c528-5874-11ec-a808-3197a22b19fa_story.html |
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