Jesse Watters
Jesse Bailey Watters is an American conservative political commentator and television program host on the Fox News cable television network. He frequently appeared earlier in his media career on The O'Reilly Factor, the political talk show hosted by commentator/moderator Bill O'Reilly, and became recognized for his man-on-the-street interviews, featured in his segment there of "Watters' World", which, in 2015, eventually became its own show. In January 2017, Watters' World became a weekly television show, and in April 2017, he became a co-host of the roundtable series The Five. In January 2022, Watters became the host of his own program, Jesse Watters Primetime, on the Fox News Channel.
Watters' first book, How I Saved the World, was published by HarperCollins. His second book, Get It Together: Troubling Tales from the Liberal Fringe, was published by Broadside Books in March 2024.
Early life and education
Watters was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in several different neighborhoods, then briefly during high school in Long Island, New York. He is the son of Stephen Hapgood Watters, a teacher, and child psychologist Anne Purvis, daughter of Morton Bailey Jr., publisher of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. His maternal great-grandfather was another Morton Bailey, publisher of the prominent longtime magazine The Saturday Evening Post; his maternal great-great-grandfather was Morton Shelley Bailey, a lawyer, politician, state senator, and district judge in Colorado, later serving as an Associate Justice on the Colorado Supreme Court in the state capital of Denver, Colorado.Watters' paternal grandfather, Franklin Benjamin Watters, was a cardiologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Newington, Connecticut, and a professor at the University of Connecticut Medical Dental School. Watters is also the cousin of ballet dancer Harper Watters and the nephew of longtime current New Hampshire state senator David H. Watters, a Democrat, serving in the upper chamber of the state Senate of the bicameral General Court of New Hampshire at the New Hampshire State House, in the state capital town of Concord.
He has some Irish ancestry on his father's side. Watters is named after his mother's great-grandfather, Jesse Andrew Burnett, an associate chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court in their state capital of Topeka, Kansas.
Watters grew up in the Germantown neighborhood of Upper Northwest Philadelphia and then later moved to the East Falls neighborhood of the city's Lower Northwest. He attended the William Penn Charter School through junior year of secondary school, before relocating again with his family, this time from Pennsylvania to Long Island, New York state. In 2001, he graduated from Trinity College in the state capital of Hartford, Connecticut, with a Bachelor of Arts in history.
Career
After graduating from Trinity College in Hartford, Watters was employed as a production assistant at Fox News in New York City. In 2003, he moved to the production staff of The O'Reilly Factor; in 2004, Watters began to appear on air in segments of O'Reilly's show.On June 11, 2014, Watters debuted on the Fox News Channel show Outnumbered, later occasionally appearing as a guest co-host. On November 20, 2015, Watters debuted his own monthly Fox News program, Watters' World. While Watters is characterized as an "ambush journalist", Watters has said, "I try to make it enjoyable for the person I'm interviewing. We always come away from the interview all smiles, for the most part. And it's always fun to come back and look at the footage and say, 'Oh my gosh, what just happened?'" In January 2017, Watters' World became a weekly show, airing Saturdays at 8 p.m. ET.
In April 2017, Watters became a co-host of the roundtable series The Five.
In April 2021, HarperCollins announced the publication of Watters' new book, How I Saved the World, which was published on July 6. The book debuted at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the week ending July 10, 2021.
After being one of several rotating fill-in hosts in the network's 7 p.m. time slot, it was announced on January 10, 2022, that Watters would become the permanent host of a new primetime show, titled Jesse Watters Primetime, which debuted on January 24, 2022.
Watters' World program ended its run on January 15, 2022, while Watters continues to be a co-host of the continuing The Five.
In June 2023, Fox News announced Watters as the permanent host of the network's 8 p.m. EST hour following the firing of controversial fellow conservative commentator Tucker Carlson.
In January 2024, he claimed to viewers, without evidence, that pop singer Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce's relationship was part of a "psyop" directed by the United States Department of Defense. In July 2024, he said that he "heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman."
Controversies
Amanda Terkel stalking
In 2009, on assignment for The O'Reilly Factor, Watters and his cameraman followed journalist Amanda Terkel in her car for two hours while she drove to Winchester, Virginia, for vacation, and then asked her several questions about an article she had written beforehand that was critical of Bill O'Reilly.Seven years later, at the White House Correspondents Dinner journalists' reception, The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim approached Watters with his phone camera running and asked him to walk over to Terkel and apologize. Watters at first said he would apologize and then said he would not, adding, "I ambushed her because O'Reilly told me to get her because she said some bad shit." Video of the incident shows Watters then grabbing Grim's phone and throwing it on the floor, and later grabbing it again and putting it in his pocket. Eventually, the two got into a shoving match as Grim attempted to recover his phone. Watters later commented on the incident on The O'Reilly Factor, stating, "I was at this party trying to enjoy myself. This guy came up to me. He starts putting it in my face."
Terkel wrote that Watters' response was "surprising", considering that "Watters' way of confronting his subjects is to thrust cameras in their faces unexpectedly and pepper them with aggressive questions."
Chinatown segment
In October 2016, Watters was criticized for a segment of Watters' World that was widely considered racist toward Asian Americans. In New York City's Chinatown, Watters asked Chinese Americans whether they knew karate, whether he should bow before greeting them, or if their watches had been stolen. Throughout the segment, the 1974 song "Kung Fu Fighting" plays in the background, and the interviews are interspersed with references to martial arts and clips of Watters getting a foot massage and playing with nunchucks. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio denounced Watters' segment as "vile, racist behavior" that "has no place in our city". Numerous other lawmakers and journalists, including US Senator Mazie Hirono and US Representative Judy Chu, also condemned Watters. The segment was also criticized by the Asian American Journalists Association, which issued a statement saying, "We should be far beyond tired, racist stereotypes and targeting an ethnic group for humiliation and objectification on the basis of their race."On October 5, 2016, Watters tweeted what Variety's Will Thorne called a "non-apology" about the segment. In the two tweets, Watters stated that "My man-on-the-street interviews are meant to be taken as tongue-in-cheek and I regret if anyone found offense.... As a political humorist, the Chinatown segment was intended to be a light piece, as all Watters' World segments are."