Jessica Tarlov: The Liberal Fox News Viewers Love to Hate

A day after Bret Baier’s contentious interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Fox News punditocracy on “The Five,” the network’s most popular show, was celebrating. “She’s ice-cold, she’s unlikable, and her arguments are incoherent,” sneered Jesse Watters. “The look and the tone of a D.M.V. clerk who wants to take her break,” scoffed Greg Gutfeld.

But, reports The NY Times, a dissenter was in their midst.

“What Kamala Harris needed to do was to show up, to look tough, to not get rattled,” said Jessica Tarlov, the show’s resident Democrat and one of Ms. Harris’s most outspoken defenders in the cantankerous realm of cable news. She added, “I think she handled herself really well.”

Her co-hosts, avid supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, rolled their eyes. Ms. Tarlov, 40, paid no heed. She told Fox viewers that Trump was “unstable,” “unfit” and devoid of sympathy. She debunked the network’s usual talking points about a migrant-fueled crime wave, pointing out the national decrease in homicides.

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.

She has even managed to stay on cordial terms with the Trump loyalists who try — teasingly, they say — to disparage her views on television on a daily basis. Jeanine Pirro says Ms. Tarlov is “smart as hell.” She is on texting terms with Mr. Watters’s 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,” Ms. 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.

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.