James Carville Joins Fox News
James Carville has signed a contract to join Fox News Channel as a regular commentator:
James Carville, the “ragin’ cajun” Democratic strategist, has signed on with Fox News, the network announced Thursday.
“James’ successful and storied career in politics over several decades is an enormous asset to Fox News,” Bill Shine, Fox News’s executive vice president of programming, said in a statement. “We are privileged to have him lend his breadth of experience, wit and dynamic perspective on the network.”
Carville led Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and spent the last decade as a political commentator for CNN. He and his wife, Mary Matalin, a Republican strategist, ended their relationship with the network last year after Jeff Zucker took over as president.
Since leaving Fox, Carville has appeared on a variety of other networks, including MSNBC and ABC News. While this may seem like an unusual fit for both parties, one has to admit that Carville has never been one to shrink away from a good partisan fight, or a camera for that matter, and he’s likely to bring some good fireworks to several of Fox’s programs. Heck, I may even tune in to watch him tear apart a pinhead like O”Reilly or Hannity just for the sheer entertainment value.
There you go again! Giving way too much credit where it is undeserved.
That would be fun…
Roger Ailes has been moving Fox away from the looniest of the loony Right-wing. He dumped Glen Beck and promoted the conservative-but-not-rabid Megan Kelly, among other moves. Carville will not likely be the designated incoherent whipping boy Alan Colmes used to be. Ailes can read ratings and demographics as well as anyone. He knows his average viewer is 68 years old, vs. CNN and network news watchers who average age 60.
You know what 68 is the average of? 45 and 90. That’s some old, old demo there. That’s the Depends demo, not even the hard-on pills demo.
James Carville has been on multiple times with Bill O’Reilly over the last few months. I expect him to have a weekly segment with O’Reilly soon.
@michael reynolds:
Ailes did not dump Beck because he was too loony. He dumped Beck because he Beck had his own brand, in one sense he was becoming bigger than FNC(Read Gabriel Sherman biography of Ailes). Murdoch also has lots of Jewish Friends, and the Jewish community was pressuring Fox to dump Beck because of his allegations that Holocaust Survivor George Soros collaborated with the Nazis.
To quote Oscar Wilde: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”