Rupert, Lachlan and James Murdoch have fired Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly who will not be returning to the network April 24th at the conclusion of his vacation. Meh.
Fox News has announced the decision to move Tucker Carlson to the 8:00pm slot and shift their 5:00pm program “The Five” to the 9:00pm hour. The centerpiece of the panel show, Eric Bolling, will remain at 5:00pm with his own hour long program.
Effective April 24th the line-up appears to look like this:
5:00pm – Eric Bolling
6:00pm – Brett Baier Special Reports
7:00pm – Martha MacCallum (temp 100 days)
8:00pm – Tucker Carlson
9:00pm – The Five
10:00pm – Sean Hannity
More than likely this line-up will not work long-term.
The Fox Show “The Five” is not ideologically aligned between Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. The Five show is fraught with inconsequential gnat banter and provides no substantive intellectual perspectives to warrant a prime-time following.
The 9:00pm hour will fail because gnat banter is shallow and solid prime-time political/consequential news requires newsworthy guests to discuss important topics and intellectual discussion. Absent intelligent and stimulative guests, people tune out. Roger Ailes knew this key and critical aspect of constructing political TV viewership.
No-one cares about the opinion of the “The Five” annoying gnats who collectively end up tuned out because their voices instinctively force the eardrum to protect itself and the broadcast ends up sounding like a round table of Charlie Brown’s teachers: “wauh, wauh, wauh”. Additionally, everyone already knows the opinions and tastes of the cucumber and mayonnaise on wonder-bread punditry.
Wait,.. was that my outside voice?
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