Jessica Tarlov understands your skepticism. The liberal co-host of Fox News Channel’s The Five hears from viewers and peers all the time. For conservatives, she is someone who pierces the ideological bubble of the show. For liberals, she is sometimes seen as a traitor to the cause, working for the enemy.
But Tarlov doesn’t let it get to her. It actually inspires her to try and persuade skeptical conservatives that liberals might have some points and to convince those on the left that it is worth it, or even necessary, to go on Fox News and get in front of Republicans.
TV was not in Tarlov’s original career plan (despite having a Hollywood connection, more on that below), but when she broke through on The Five she did so in a big way, pushing back against the likes of Greg Gutfeld, Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro, but always in a way that was more reminiscent of a family dinner than ideological warfare.
This week she releases a book, I Disagree, that is part memoir and part self-help guide. It tracks her career and time at Fox, and gives some practical advice to readers for how to navigate those family get-togethers.
The Hollywood Reporter recently caught up with Tarlov to discuss it. The interview has been edited for clarity.
Help me understand what sparked the idea for this book. It’s a really interesting concept, you combine the anecdotes with tips for how to help people navigate this stuff in real life. Why did you decide to go with that particular format?
Jessica Tarlov: So, the idea to write the book was a combination of that opening scene with the Columbia Journalism students after the 2024 election that I start the book with, which was a soothing afternoon for me because it was great to meet the next generation of people who wanted to go out there and do fearless journalism and get into the space, and to better understand what it is that’s top of mind for them, and then the shock that they were so interested in getting out of ideological silos — whether it’s because I’ve spent so much time maybe with my colleagues who have a particular viewpoint of the ivory tower and how there’s no ideological division whatsoever on college campuses anymore, and I don’t assume that I understand the politics of these students necessarily — but I have this assumption that this is going to be a bunch of left wingers, who wanted to follow traditional paths wherever they were going, and they were so focused on the idea of being able to shape a worldview and go out there and defend it.
It really kind of threw me for a loop, and I thought, “oh, this is different.” The election definitely had impacted them. The assumption amongst a lot of people was that Donald Trump, who was historically unpopular then and now is even more historically unpopular, he couldn’t be President again, even with how difficult the Democratic side of of the table was, and especially when you’re talking to people in their 20s, they want to believe that people get into office who believe the same things that you do, and that it would be normal to elect someone who had the same view on civil rights and the environment and abortion and all those kinds of things. So the 2024 election really scrambled things for them, and they saw it.
And then the second aspect is just that since I’ve been doing this job in earnest, and definitely since I became the co-host of The Five, four and a half years ago now, I just hear from a lot of people, no matter their ideological background, that they want to be able to talk more, and they say, exasperated, “I don’t know how you do it.”
There’s a couple things that I want to dig into there. One of them, which you just alluded to, is the part of your brain that still thinks about the data and how that can inform what you do, and then the art of persuasion, talking to people. It’s one thing to to rattle off numbers, it’s another thing to actually get people to engage and listen. I was hoping you could maybe elaborate a little bit on that as someone who does that professionally on television but also tries to tackle it in the book in a way that helps other people do that. What in your mind are come some of the the key things that you think about that you hope readers can kind of get across when they when they read the book and as they go into these kitchen table conversations, so to speak?
Tarlov: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s hard to pick one tip that is most important, and I was thankful once we got to the idea of having tips boxes that I would have a lot of runway to include a bunch of them. But something that I think about on a daily basis, and it certainly factors into my commentary and just generally how I present, is that it’s important to think in averages and not anecdotes. We are in such a “facts don’t care about your feelings” stratosphere, even more so than I think we were in the 2016 election when Ben Shapiro first said that to explain why so many people took a flyer on Donald Trump, didn’t care about the Access Hollywood tape, and that being outraged about how offensive something is, or how it upsets your moral compass just doesn’t matter on a policy level, and it’s not actually what people are looking for from their electeds.
I think it’s so important, and even though Twitter might have a different opinion sometimes about how I present, since there’s always the folks out there saying that I’m just emotional and boo-hooing about how mean Stephen Miller is. The reality is that using these trend lines and these averages is the best way for me to be able to get my point across, not only on the day that I’m having the conversation, but throughout the long game, which is really how I think about my persuasion. I say in the book, I don’t think my job is to change minds. I think it’s to open them and to make people who are watching the show, who think differently than me and certainly vote differently than me, acknowledge the fact that I’m not someone who should just be dismissed as an overemotional liberal with TDS, for instance, and I do hear that from a lot of viewers that they don’t agree with me, but they know that I do my homework.
One of the anecdotes you mentioned in the book has you at a Fox News event and a viewer who I think had said some nasty stuff in a tweet or post approached you, I guess this person was sick and it changed how they view things, and they wanted to kind of say something face to face. I thought it was a telling anecdote that I think touches on the state of media and the bubbles and silos that we live in, and how the personal connection is actually quite distinct. It struck me as a good example of what you discuss in the book about the need to engage with people in real life, and the difference between how people are on social media and what they are in real life.
As you look at the landscape, do you think it’s possible to pop that bubble? Because I do get the sense that it is very easy to think that everyone is so entrenched and that you’re only watching certain things, you’re only being fed certain things, I think that what you talk about in the book is really helpful and useful to get people to engage. But how do you make sure that they can actually do it? And that they’ll be able to actually see that in practice?
Tarlov: Well, I actually think it’s a lot easier for younger generations than it is for older people. You see that with Gen Zs that they want to be out in the wild, that they want to meet up and find community, even when that community is fostered through politics, and they’re not as ideologically dug in as even millennials. Certainly, Gen Xers and then Boomers being the most dug in of all. Mamdani, for instance, tapped into that perfectly. Do you remember the treasure hunt that he did?
Yeah.
Tarlov: That’s just perfect politics for today to me, right? You get your viral social clip, obviously, but you’ve created an event that is not overtly political that unites people to a political cause, and that feels like the future of politics to me when it’s done right. Even though as I wrote in the book, Mamdani did not appeal to me on a political level, really, until I started to get to know his vibe, which is a very Obama-era thing to say. But I think it’s going to be easier for young people because they’re not as siloed.
They created the debate vertical on TikTok, for instance. That’s because young people want to see folks talking to each other. They want to see takedowns and those viral moments. But there is such a genuine interest to listen to people with alternative points of view and see how they represent their beliefs versus this person that believes strongly in their particular worldview. So I think that’s really heartening and exciting for the future. You look at also the types of creators that they follow; it’s always a mixed bag. But if you went into a 55-year-old’s YouTube and you saw who they subscribe to. If they’re a Bulwark person, I can tell you probably everything else that that they’re looking at. With a Gen Z it’s quite mixed up, and I’m sure Gen Alpha will be even more scrambled.
Do you think you have a distinct perspective here as someone who is on Fox News, on the network’s most popular show, and where you are kind of the dissenting voice on The Five. Just this past week, I was looking at some of the coverage of Abdul El-Sayed’s appearance on Jesse Waters’ show, and Jesse was like…
Tarlov: “I probably shouldn’t like him, but I do.”
Right, it struck me as a good example of being a recurring character, as you said. It’s not enough to pop up every now and then, but if these points of view appear with frequency — especially on a platform like Fox, which is such a dominant media platform — it certainly is meaningful, and it certainly has impact.
Tarlov: Oh, 100%. [My publicist] is probably tired of listening to me talk about how silly people sound when they act like ignoring Fox or ignoring conservative media is a viable path forward, especially for people that are trying to get folks to vote for them. I mean, it’s ludicrous to me. It goes back to the fundamental principle of politics, where you ask everyone for their vote, right? That’s what you’re supposed to do, and it’s super uncomfortable. Especially you had a nice chat, and then it feels extra to be like, “can I count on your vote?” But that’s how you seal the deal.
Look at Mamdani coming on with [Fox News anchor] Martha MacCallum, knowing exactly what his three big points is that he wanted to make, when he was going to look into the camera and talk directly to Andrew Cuomo, for instance, there are ways to have such a broader, bigger conversation-not just the sheer numbers of it, but the ideological span that you can tap into by having these conversations on Fox. I talk to Democratic electeds every day about how they should think about conservative media, who they should go on with if they get the opportunity to do it, and also what kind of messaging I think is resonating best because there’s a lot of things that the national party are saying that I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole.
You know Greg is going to jump down my throat if I’m using a something that feels like a DNC talking point, but I have a feel now for our audience, which is 20% Democrats, 30% Independents, and then 50% MAGA to Romney Republicans. So a wide range, but you can tell if something is just stinky, right? Watching Chuck Schumer doing it more than he should, watching some of these press conferences and hearing what the talking points are and thinking, “who in their right mind came up with that or thought that that’s going to be resonant with voters?” So it’s a numbers game and the ability to talk to such a broad audience, but it’s also a way to test your ideas and to see what sits with people who vote differently than you, but makes them push back vociferously. And sometimes that can be good or bad.
I know it’s always tough to to avoid getting cut off by Greg Gutfeld, but part of the game. I did want to say, The Five does actually remind me a little bit of the the Thanksgiving table test that you talk about in the book, because of the personalities. Obviously, it’s television but the personalities at play, the Greg Gutfelds, the Jeanine Pirros [when she was on], those are the types of personalities that people encounter in real life. It’s family members, it’s aunts, it’s cousins, it’s siblings, parents, it did strike me that there’s a connective tissue between what you see on TV and what people experience in real life with their own families.
Tarlov: My alternate title was Surviving Thanksgiving, so we would have just pushed back the release date a little bit, and I’m happy with the choice that we made. But I do realize that there are people who would want to pick up my book because they actually want to know what to say if they’re having a fight with their uncle about immigration, for instance. Which is why I added that appendix, so you could cliff notes through it if that’s what you wanted to do, but have you ever watched the Jesse’s mom text segment that he does in his hour [where Watters shows text exchanges with his liberal mother]?
Yeah.
Tarlov: So I text with his mom regularly. She’s texting him if he’s been really bad, and she’s texting me if he’s being really bad as well. But we just catch up generally, but the reason that mom text is so resonant is first, it’s self-effacing, right? That Jesse would do something like that, but it connects with people more because they know that from their own lives, right? They have someone in their family whose kid is politically a black sheep in their ecosystem, and it’s funny, but it’s mostly real and resonant.
There’s a Hollywood connection that a lot of people who may see you on TV don’t know about: Your dad [Warner Bros. executive turned film producer Mark Tarlov]. Was he someone that you talked to when you first started doing stuff on air at Fox, and what advice did he give you or talk to you about as you began exploring that part of of your career?
Tarlov: I will say that people love to tweet about my dad when they’re calling for me to be fired, and they’re saying that I won’t ever be [fired] because I come from a Hollywood family, and that my dad was close with Rupert Murdoch, which is not true. But it’s always funny. They’ll dig anything up, and they’re like, “oh, she can’t be fired, this is all the cabal, the Jewish space lasers cabal.”
My dad was very involved on a daily basis. When I started doing TV, if I got booked for something, I would text him what the topics were going to be, and we’d go back and forth to figure out what talking points I really wanted to get across and what the big points were. And he was a huge news consumer, and that’s why I wrote about watching the Sunday shows and then going to play tennis together. So he helped me prepare.
I cannot remember a time early on that I went on TV without having spoken to him about the topic and what he was thinking about that particular news story. He never, and no one in my orbit or close orbit ever questioned why I was doing this on Fox.
You also work with Scott Galloway on the Raging Moderates podcast and you seem like you’re kind of very attuned to the disjointed way people get their information now, and I think that was a theme that you discuss in the book, even in that opening anecdote with the students at at Columbia. But I’m curious, as you look at the overall landscape, as someone who’s in it, but also as someone who has really smart thoughts about it, what do you think are the things that people can do to actively try and get these different perspectives? Or to check themselves as they think about how they approach politics and news and the world?
Tarlov: I think there’s the basic answer to broaden your horizons in terms of who you follow and what information you take in. I mean, my algorithm is super messed up. Not just because Elon Musk has destroyed Twitter, but because I am seeking out what might inform how I want to present on a certain issue, but also for me to be able to better understand or even predict where it is that I think my colleagues are going to go, and I’m not saying that it’s a perfect formula that I know exactly what they’re going to say. But I think if Jesse’s going to say five things, let’s say about the Iran war, on any given day, three of them I can at least know are coming from having a sense of where he goes for his news.
So, I think there’s the work that you can do to make sure that your algorithm isn’t keeping you totally by yourself.
