Fox News’ Emily Compagno Groans After Hearing Jimmy Kimmel’s Ratings

Fox News host Emily Compagno couldn’t hold back her disgust when she learned that Jimmy Kimmel‘s ratings are up, audibly groaning when her co-host Harris Faulkner shared the stats.

The Outnumbered panel was discussing Melania Trump‘s calls for Kimmel to be fired after the late-night host joked that she had “the glow of an expectant widow.” Kimmel made the quip three days before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting.

Compagno praised the first lady for calling out Kimmel, adding, “I know there is always going to be somebody that is trash. I note, however, that [Kimmel] enjoyed a Peabody Award this year. So we’re seeing this permissive ecosystem within that ‘journalism’ is also rewarding these people’s behavior.”

She went on to say that Kimmel can put that award on his wall alongside “an admonishment and his termination letter.”

Faulkner then told the panel, “Our team at Outnumbered looked this up: [Kimmel’s] numbers are actually up.”

“Ugh!” Compagno responded.

Faulkner continued, “Yeah, that means it sells against, you know, [Stephen] Colbert and [Jimmy] Fallon, and I don’t watch enough nighttime news to know if they’re even competitive with each other, or with the audience — it’s 1.8 million a night which is far less than most of the daytime programming on Fox.”

She added, “But, you know, it’s interesting they have seen a sharp downturn in previous years leading into this one, but his numbers are up. So the landscape is falling down — Greg Gutfeld’s better than everybody, his numbers almost double that — but it is interesting. There are people out there who like calling first lady an unexpected widow.”

Kimmel’s actual words were that Melania had “the glow of an expectant widow.” As he explained on Monday’s (April 27) Jimmy Kimmel Live!, it was “obviously a joke about their age difference… a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am.”

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“It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination, and they know that I’ve been very vocal for many years, speaking out against gun violence in particular,” the late-night host added.

Fellow Outnumbered panelist Kaylee McGhee White then referenced Kimmel’s one-week suspension last September following backlash to comments he made about the one-week suspension assassination.

“I do actually think that Jimmy Kimmel learned a lesson from that entire saga, and it’s that he could get away with it,” she argued. “Because not only was he re-platformed by ABC even after many of the local affiliates threatened to drop him entirely from their channels, but you had the entire liberal establishment rally around him and claimed that him being suspended for a week was an attack on free speech.”

She continued, “That was the end of the world for liberal journalists everywhere, when he took a nice paid week off.”