So, about a week and a half before Mr. Beck signed off, Mr. Ailes wrote the words “The Five” on a piece of paper. Looking to the ABC talk show “The View” and to the time of day as inspiration, he pictured five co-hosts who could argue about the day’s top stories without feeling antipathy for one another. When announced on June 30, Mr. Beck’s last day, “The Five” seemed to be a temporary fix — even to the co-hosts, who were initially told they were just trying out for a weekend show.
But the show has stuck and has become a permanent part of the network’s lineup. The show’s ratings, though generally not as high as Mr. Beck’s, are growing. And most important, the advertisers that had shunned Mr. Beck are coming back to the time slot.
Of Mr. Beck, Roger Domal, the vice president for eastern ad sales at Fox News, said, “I think that his ratings provided us, unfortunately, with empty calories.” In mid-2009, groups lobbied advertisers to boycott Mr. Beck’s broadcast after he called President Obama a racist, making the show “basically something that we could not monetize,” Mr. Domal said.
Now, on “The Five,” he said, “there are no issues at all; the program has a full complement of ads.”
The surprise success of “The Five” gives Fox News, a unit of News Corporation, a stable schedule in a presidential election season that has played out largely on its own airwaves. Fox remains the country’s most-watched cable news channel by far, with more than a million viewers at any given time, though it is down about 4 percent this year from its audience levels last year.
“The Five” is shown at a crucial time — 5 p.m. Eastern — that acts as a transition between daytime and prime time. Of the seven rotating hosts, the five regulars are Greg Gutfeld, who also helms the overnight show “Red Eye”; Eric Bolling, who also has a show on the Fox Business Network; the former Bush administration spokeswoman Dana Perino; the conservative columnist Andrea Tantaros; and the Mondale campaign manager and Fox analyst Bob Beckel.
Two others, Juan Williams and Kimberly Guilfoyle, sometimes sub in.
“We genuinely get along inside and out,” Mr. Gutfeld said in an interview last week. “When it gets too heated, you can tell that we feel bad about it afterwards.”
Said Mr. Beckel in a separate interview, “It’s like seeing a family at Thanksgiving come home and argue about politics, but you know that everybody loves each other.”
When Mr. Beck joined Fox in January 2009, he more than doubled the 5 p.m. time slot’s ratings, sometimes drawing as many as three million viewers. But love didn’t exactly radiate from the time slot. He spurred controversy — with the “racist” remark and many others — and eventually fell out of favor with Fox, so it came as no surprise when the two sides mutually agreed to split up. Mr. Beck is now hosting a daily show on GBTV, an Internet channel that costs $5 to $10 a month.
In his final month on Fox, Mr. Beck had an average of 1.6 million viewers; the following month, “The Five” had fewer than 1.3 million.
It has steadily gained audience share since then, and in mid-September Mr. Ailes made the show permanent. So far this month it had 1.6 million daily viewers, matching Mr. Beck’s final numbers for the first time.
“Not having a host, just in and of itself, is a departure for cable news,” said Mr. Beckel, who commutes to New York weekly from Washington to be on the show. Viewers, he said, “are looking all day long at cable news and they’re seeing guest, host, guest, host — and this is a departure from that.”
Conservative opinions and themes are front and center on the show, as they are on virtually all of Fox’s opinion programs. Blogs took notice this month when Mr. Bolling asked, halfway into the show, “Guys, why are we doing our third segment on, like, beating up Newt Gingrich or trashing Donald Trump? Where’s the segment on Obama’s socialist economy, isn’t working? Where’s the section on guns or unions?”
“You’re going through withdrawal,” Mr. Beckel answered, adding that “about every other segment on every other show is” about Mr. Obama.
Mr. Beckel said in an interview, however, that he did not feel outmatched on the show, in part because “a big chunk of the show is not about politics.”
Added Ms. Perino in a separate interview, “We’re very mindful about keeping the show fresh.”
Ms. Perino, who was commuting to New York like Mr. Beckel, recently decided to move to the city with her husband. She said she often gets stopped in public by viewers. “Usually,” she said, “I get asked, ‘Does Bob Beckel really believe those things he says?’ ”
Brian Krason, a grant writer who lives outside Boston and who calls himself an ex-conservative, watches the show in part for that reason.
Mr. Beckel, Mr. Krason said, challenges and sometimes even changes his views.
“The appeal of the show for me is that it is truly balanced in its reporting,” he said. “Although it is really four conservatives and one liberal, Bob Beckel keeps the others in line and corrects the facts when needed.”
Production of “The Five” has been assigned to John Finley, the longtime producer of Sean Hannity’s 9 p.m. talk show on the network, and there are some similarities between the two. On Mr. Hannity’s show, there is a segment called the “Great American Panel” with three rotating guests.
“The Five” and several lower-rated talk shows that started on MSNBC this year are representative of a continued shift on cable to talk about the news and away from actual news reports.
“People know what the news is,” said Mr. Domal, the ad sales executive. “You’re not coming to cable news for news anymore. You’re coming for either validation of your opinion or you’re looking to find out what the other side is saying.”
It is, he said, analogous to the debates that break out on peoples’ Facebook walls.
“It’s almost like we’re social media, live,” he said. “They’re just talking to each other. They’re just posting.”
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6748536f33a44b10925f951c49b836b3
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