Have you ever thought about how weird it must be to be a famous news anchor? For one thing, you have to talk to people constantly, whether that be fellow anchors or on-air guests. And if you ever make a mistake, it’s not like it will fly under the radar. After all, when you have millions of people watching, your every blunder is going to receive crazy amounts of scrutiny.
This is something that several Fox News anchors have discovered the hard way. When they make mistakes, they make big ones, and the internet usually has a field day with their mistakes. Care to catch up on some of their craziest blunders, either to re-live the cringe or experience it for the first time? Just keep reading to discover the weirdest blunders ever made by Fox News anchors!
Jesse Watters gives everyone the ick
The job of a Fox News anchor is, at least on paper, to report on national and international news. Often, though, they venture into talking about their personal lives. And Jesse Watters figured this out for himself when he told what was meant to be a cute story about deflating a woman’s tires so she would have to accept his offer of a ride.
Watters is currently married to Emma DiGiovine, someone with whom he started flirting with while he was still married to his previous wife, Noelle Watters. That’s already pretty icky, but he took things to the next level by admitting on air in 2022 that he had left the air out of DiGiovine’s tires one day so that she would have no choice but to accept his offer of taking her home.
The tale didn’t exactly go over well…fellow host Greg Gutfeld compared Watters to a serial killer, and many online noted how creepy it was that Watters messed with a woman’s vehicle to force her to spend time with him. A few days later, Watters claimed he was only joking about this story, and we’re not sure what’s worse: the idea that this really happened or the idea that this “joke” was supposed to be funny.
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Laura Ingraham gets deeply confused
Laura Ingraham is one of Fox News’ most recognizable hosts, a veteran journalist who usually has no trouble talking to others. However, in 2021, she had an interview with Raymond Arroyo where a single word derailed the entire conversation. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, the two were discussing “woke-free TV,” and Arroyo said, “I was watching an episode of You, where measles came up.”
This deeply confused Ingraham because she didn’t realize he was talking about the TV show You and thought Arroyo was referring to one of her own episodes. They went back and forth, with Arroyo getting increasingly flustered at the confusion. Ingraham later called this controversy “Yougate” but also tried to claim that she and her guest were just joking. As with Watters’ bizarre backtracking, though, we’re skeptical about the claim that it’s just a joke, especially with their lines being so awkward and Arroyo looking genuinely annoyed by her confusion.
Martha MacCallum and the ‘Holy Grail’ of onscreen blunders
Sometimes, Fox News anchors are guilty of using online sources such as Reddit to discuss current events. For example, in 2020, Martha MacCallum was discussing the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. As reported by The Independent, she said, “We’re also learning that there is infighting among some of the occupiers, and some signs of rebellion against Raz Simone.” Those “signs” seemed to begin and end with a Reddit post where a user wrote, “I didn’t vote for Raz. I thought we were an autonomous collective? An anarcho-syndicalist commune at the least. We should take turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.”
If you’re chuckling now, then you’ve probably figured out what went right over McCallum’s head: the Reddit user was quoting Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Internet critics joked about how she and other Fox News anchors were incapable of realizing a joke when they saw it. Holy Grail star John Cleese even took to Facebook to write “BREAKING: No one [at] Fox News has ever seen Monty Python & The Holy Grail,” adding insult to injury with the hashtags #Goodjournalism and #factchecking.
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Laura Ingraham gets brutally called out
Sometimes, the biggest blunder a Fox News anchor can make is acting a bit too petty to a guest. Laura Ingraham discovered this in 2023 when interviewing Steve Almond, the author of Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto. As reported by The Young Turks, he said that NFL teams should have special financial incentives to prioritize the health and safety of players because “The reason that people change their behavior is because there’s an economic incentive.”
Ingraham rolled her eyes at this, which annoyed Almond enough to brutally call her out. “Couple years ago, when you taunted the survivor of Parkland’s mass shooting, you apologized, only because advertisers withdrew from your show,” he said, a clear reference to Ingraham attacking the young mass shooting survivor turned gun control advocate David Hogg.
After that, Ingraham’s reply was almost impossibly lame: “Oh yeah — save it, nice try, little buddy. Nice try, buddy,” she said before cutting his interview short. Between the stupid comeback and retreating from the interview, it’s easy to see that Ingraham had no real reply to Almond’s very accurate citation of her own behavior.