The Fox News host that its viewers (and Trump) love to hate

The token liberal has long been a stock character of Fox News’ ongoing opéra bouffe. Sean Hannity was paired with Alan Colmes. The lefty chair on The Five cycled through Bob Beckel (fired), Juan Williams (transferred) and Geraldo Rivera (who was demoted and then quit).

Few, though, have broken out like Tarlov, a dish-it-out Democratic strategist with a résumé that reads like a parody of a Manhattan elitist: prep school at Dalton, a degree from Bryn Mawr, a family loft in the Tribeca neighbourhood of Manhattan and a father who produced movies by liberal provocateur John Waters. (“Right from the heartland,” she jokes.)

Despite her un-Fox upbringing, Tarlov has thrived by bursting viewers’ bubbles on a network where pro-Harris voices are scarce. Her exchanges on The Five have become a staple of the @KamalaHQ social media account, which the Harris campaign uses to amplify positive media moments for its candidate. The “Pod Save America” guys invited Tarlov on their podcast. Democratic stars like California Governor Gavin Newsom have gone out of their way to say hello when visiting Fox’s studios.

She has even managed to stay on cordial terms with the Trump loyalists who try — teasingly, they say — to disparage her views on television daily. Jeanine Pirro says Tarlov is “smart as hell,” and they share makeup and jewellery tips. Hannity, who gave Tarlov an early break on his prime-time show, calls her “family.” She is on texting terms with Watters’ mother, a registered Democrat, whose advice for dealing with her son on the air is simple: “Kick him.”

“I’m there to represent, at least of the voting public, the majority of Americans,” Tarlov said over a recent breakfast. “We” — she meant Democrats in 2020 — “got 81 million votes. There are more of me than there are of them.” Her goal, she said, is to inject a Democratic perspective into the Fox bloodstream while showing viewers that ideological foes can still get along.

“I also want to win elections,” said Tarlov, who got her start in politics working for Douglas Schoen, a Democratic pollster. “And I think that being on the most-watched show is the best place to do it.”

Indeed, since Tarlov became a regular on The Five in 2022 — she now shares the liberal chair with Harold Ford Jr., a former House Democrat — the program has remained the undisputed top draw in all of cable news, watched by a bigger audience than even Fox’s prime-time stars.

‘He knows how to hurt you’

All that exposure has caught the eye of right-wing critics — Trump among them. This month, the former president included “Jessica Tarloff?” in his list of “Harris Radical Left Democrat mouthpieces” who, he contended, had tainted the network. (“FoxNews has totally lost its way!“)

It was not the first time Tarlov earned his ire. In 2023, Trump watched a Five segment and issued this scathing verdict: “Her jittery presentation is horrendous and, forgive me, her VOICE is grating and unendurable.”

Loading

“He knows how to hurt you,” Tarlov said of the former president. “He did it overnight, so I woke up to all of that on my phone, and it obviously invites a ton of horrific people into your Twitter life.”

Shaken, she turned to Pirro, a longtime Trump friend, for advice. “I showed it to her, and I was like, ‘This is garbage,’ and she was like, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry,‘” Tarlov recalled.

Tarlov, who posts regularly to her more than 211,000 followers on the social platform X, conceded that the criticism could be unsettling.

“If you look at my Twitter feed, it’s a complete cesspool,” she said. The other day, when she posted that she would appear on Baier’s newscast, one user replied, “Jessica is a terrible person and a DEMON.”

Sometimes her mother — Judith Roberts, a screenwriter who wrote the 1999 rom-com Simply Irresistible, which was directed by Tarlov’s father, Mark Tarlov, who died in 2021 — sends a concerned text message to check if she’s OK.

Tarlov, who gave birth to her second daughter in April, said her husband, Brian McKenna, a financier, had never watched cable news before they met as next-door neighbours during the pandemic.

“He honestly thinks it’s all play,” she said of the vicious messages she receives. “And sometimes I wonder if it is.”

As the designated outlier of The Five, Tarlov skews further left than predecessors like Rivera, who for a while openly supported Trump. But her more liberal views, rather than turning off viewers, seem to have sharpened the show’s edges and provided her conservative co-hosts with a useful foil.

“I like to pretend that I’m angry at her,” Gutfeld said. “She knows I’m a prankster. She knows Jesse is a knucklehead. But we both really, really like her, and she likes us.”

Brit Hume, Fox News’ chief political analyst, observed that the most successful TV panel shows provide viewers with a reliable cast of characters to choose from.

“People tune in to watch people they love to love,” he said, “and people they love to hate.”

‘Hardest job on television’

The lower Manhattan loft where Tarlov grew up was originally the home of a Bazzini Nuts factory. Her parents regularly pulled her and her sister out of school to travel to film sets, including in South Africa and New Zealand. After college, Tarlov moved to Britain, where she earned a doctorate at the London School of Economics and worked on Boris Johnson’s London mayoral campaign. Back in New York, she landed a job with Schoen’s firm after her grandparents approached the pollster at the Harmonie Club, on the Upper East Side, and talked up their bright granddaughter.

Schoen, who was a longtime Fox News contributor, was impressed with Tarlov’s communications skills and began recommending her to bookers at the network. “Whenever I would critique her work, she would smile and come back at me, so I knew she would be a natural,” he said. Along the way, Tarlov became head of research at Bustle Digital Group, a female-focused online news outlet created by the founder of Bleacher Report.

When Trump won the presidency in 2016, “it was the lowest I’ve ever felt politically,” Tarlov said. She was concerned that media coverage had left Democrats unprepared for Trump’s shock victory, which she said continued to motivate her work on Fox News.

She hopes that when Fox viewers, except for the MAGA die-hards, “see a reasonable and data-driven representative of the left who can also get along with their colleagues, that makes them sit up and listen,” she told “Pod Save America.”

Her fans now include film director Quentin Tarantino, who first spotted Tarlov during one of her appearances on Bill Maher’s talk show on HBO.

“Even the existence of this one person is an interesting thing to me,” Tarantino said on Maher’s podcast. “They put her on their big show, and she says what she says against the Fox audience, and against the panel.” He added, “As far as I can see, that is the hardest job on television.”

The other co-hosts “all kind of like her, so they don’t go ballistic on her,” Tarantino continued, before asking: “How come there isn’t that person on MSNBC?”

Indeed, MSNBC does not employ a counterpart to Tarlov — a conservative who takes on the network’s many liberal stars — on any of its marquee opinion shows.

Tarlov’s on-air balancing act has created some unlikely acolytes. In July at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, several admirers approached Tarlov as she made her way from a Fox News studio back to her dressing room. One was Ellie Cohanim, who served as a special envoy to combat antisemitism in the Trump administration.

Loading

On social media, Cohanim is an avid Trump ally who has accused Harris of “treachery” against the country. In person, she gushed over Tarlov, saying, “I adore her.”

“I think it’s incredibly important to have the other viewpoint on Fox,” Cohanim said. “It makes it harder for us to have a national conversation when people are just not hearing both sides of the argument.”

Then she turned to Tarlov with a request: “Do you mind if I take a selfie?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.