Former Trump spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany will host her own Saturday morning show as Fox News announced on Wednesday that it’s reshuffling its weekend lineup, which will also result in the cancellation of its long-running media criticism program MediaBuzz.
McEnany, who joined the network in 2021 and has spent the past few years co-hosting the weekday panel show Outnumbered, will anchor Saturday in America beginning on September 20, Fox News Media president and editor-in-chief Jay Wallace announced. The two-hour program will air at 10 a.m. ET on Saturdays.
Besides the continued elevation of McEnany at the conservative cable giant, the network also revealed that MediaBuzz – which has been hosted by Howard Kurtz since 2013 – will be coming to an end this month.
The cancellation of Kurtz’s hour-long Sunday morning show now leaves the cable news landscape without any programs devoted solely to media criticism. Following CNN’s shuttering of Reliable Sources in 2022, MediaBuzz was the last remaining media-centric show left on cable.
Kurtz, who hosted Reliable Sources from 1998 to 2013 before jumping ship to Fox News, will transition to a role as a political media analyst and remain with the network. He will also continue to host his Media Buzzmeter podcast on the digital website.
“For more than a decade, Howie Kurtz has served as the lead authority for media coverage in cable news and we look forward to continuing his smart analysis across our programming,” Wallace said in his announcement.
In his own statement, Kurtz said he was “extraordinarily proud” of MediaBuzz and touted its ratings, noting that it was “number one for over 12 years and built a loyal audience that liked our down-the-middle approach of contrasting viewpoints and tackling sensitive subjects, with great independence, but time marches on.”
Meanwhile, replacing MediaBuzz in the late Sunday morning timeslot will be The Sunday Briefing, a program anchored by the network’s senior White House correspondents Jacqui Heinrich and Peter Doocy. The pair will rotate weekly as solo hosts of the show, which will air at 11 a.m. ET.
Additionally, the network – which has extended its cable ratings dominance amid Donald Trump’s return to the White House – promoted a number of rising conservative stars by giving them co-hosting gigs.
Fox News contributor Johnny “Joey” Jones and Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren were named as two of the four co-hosts of the weekend roundtable program The Big Weekend Show, which airs Saturdays and Sundays. The show has also been expanded to three hours and will air at 5 p.m. ET.
Elsewhere, longtime Fox News national correspondent Griff Jenkins – who is the co-anchor of Fox News Live – will now be a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, joining Charlie Hurt and Rachel Campos-Duffy on the curvy couch.
Trump’s former White House press secretary getting her own two-hour solo anchoring slot comes months after the network brought on the president’s daughter-in-law to host her own weekend show, laying bare the symbiotic relationship between the administration and the right-wing network.
Besides the number of family members and former Trump staffers working at the network, not to mention the MAGA-boosting hosts who serve as informal advisers to the president, the Trump administration has used Fox News as its personal staffing agency. In just the first few months of Trump’s return to office, his administration has hired roughly two dozen former Fox News employees.
Meanwhile, the cancellation of MediaBuzz would appear to dash the hopes of Fox News commentator Joe Concha, whom Sean Hannity had long advocated to get his own media criticism show. Earlier this year, Trump had praised Concha while simultaneously urging Kurtz to “retire” for not defending him strongly enough.
.jpg?trim=0,50,0,50&width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "Jesse Watters reacts to Charlie Kirk’s assassination: ‘They are at war with us!’ – UK Times")