Exclusive: Fox & Friends Icon Steve Doocy On Why He’s Moving to a New Role
After 6,828 days of waking up at 3:30 a.m., Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy decided he wanted to sleep in a bit.
Doocy has co-hosted Fox News’ flagship morning show since its inception nearly 30 years ago. Now, he’s leaving the confines of the “curvy couch” for a new role at Fox & Friends that will involve some more action (and a little more sleeping in).
“After decades of getting up at 3:30 and driving into NYC in the dark, today is the last day I will host the show…from the couch,” Doocy announced to viewers Thursday morning. “I am not retiring, I’m not leaving the show. I’m still a host —but it’s time for a change.”
Doocy will transition to a new gig as the dedicated host of the remote assignments Fox & Friends is known for – think their famed diner segments, or a recent package hosted by Doocy from the Chicken N Pickle, a suburban Kansas City pickleball facility.
The show will continue to be hosted from its New York City studios by Brian Kilmeade, Ainsley Earhardt, and Lawrence Jones, while Doocy will appear remotely.
Mediaite spoke with Doocy about this new chapter in his broadcasting career, which I’ve been following since I was a kid growing up in Overland Park, Kansas, where I watched him on the local ABC affiliate, KMBC, in the early 80s.
“I’m going to do some live hits from Florida,” Doocy told Mediaite. “But I’ll still travel some — you won’t know where I’m going to be. I’m going to be the coast-to-coast host. Not the couch host — the coast the coast host! Not having to be anchored to the NYC studios every day feels great, to be honest.”
When asked about how this all came about, Doocy became reflective. “It’s interesting, having done this for 30 years, you start thinking about how you’re going to find an off-ramp eventually,” he said. “What that looks like or what it feels like — I’ve been thinking about this for a few years and how you do it.”
Doocy revealed he has been in discussions with Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott about how to transition into what he described as “the Johnny Carson deal!”
“Suzanne and I have gone back on this for a year and a half,” Doocy said. “And we looked at what the next stage of my career with Fox News could look like, and we agreed on three days a week, and I got just what I wanted.”
“I love the show, have been at it from the get-go, but I want to work, just not hosting the show in New York City every day, but I’m not retiring,” Doocy added, with some heavy emphasis on the negation. ‘And I’m not leaving the show. I will still co-host, I’ll just enjoy a change of venue. It will be easier for me to do all the stuff I want to do.”
Ultimately, Doocy explained that after hosting the three-hour morning show for nearly 30 years, it was time for a change.
“I’ve gotten up at 3:30 a.m., 6,828 days since I started this show,” he said. “Then I travel to the city — 14 dollars in fare to go over the George Washington bridge, deal with midtown, then go home at 9 am.”
“The show is great,” he added. “I love the show — but the hours suck.”
“I get it’s the price of admission, and I have zero regrets, but I’ve done this now for almost 30 years. I’ve got such a routine,” he said. “I’ve cracked the code on how to do this, I love the show, and ratings are great — I just want to make a transition to the next stage of my personal life.”
Ratings have been excellent for Fox & Friends, particularly in the past few years. According to Nielsen Research, the show has averaged 1.5 million viewers to date in 2025 and has been the number one cable news morning show since 2001, easily beating CNN and MSNBC combined. Perhaps more notably, Fox & Friends is now drawing more viewers than the broadcast morning shows in many of the nation’s largest local markets.
In those 30 years, Doocy has established himself as a veritable morning show icon, a reliable face of the franchise morning show of the most-watched network in all of cable news. He’s beloved inside Fox headquarters at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, and is one of the more popular Fox News personalities among those at competing networks.
Doocy, who is turning 70 next year, is the longest-running morning show host on television, except for Al Roker of the Today Show. He made his debut on Fox & Friends in February 1998.
Over the last decade, he’s watched as Fox News has evolved alongside the Republican Party, which has drifted from traditional conservative values to a more Trump-obsessed political world-view – one that has grown with and been shaped by Fox programming.
Doocy has emerged, despite those pressures, as a voice of reason on the president’s favorite morning show, brave enough to represent the skeptical conservative’s case against the latest Trump move. (Keeping with the Kansas theme, his point of view has been closer to Sunflower State pol Nancy Landon Kassebaum than former Governor Sam Brownback.)
That independent streak has led to occasional sparring between Doocy and his co-hosts – clashes that have always remained convivial (this is morning television, folks) and made for good headlines. It also prompted occasional snipes from President Donald Trump and his surrogates, who were upset that Doocy was not expressing fealty to the leader each morning.
Doocy said he has a “nice relationship” with Trump, who got his start in political commentary with weekly appearances on Fox & Friends before launching his bid for the presidency in 2015.
“‘I will say this about Trump — he called me this morning during the show,” Doocy said. “I had called the president recently to get a quote about his first 100 days, looking for information about the tariffs. He called me back about 20 seconds before I was to go on air and introduce Todd Piro. I yelled to Brian ‘Can you introduce Todd Piro’ so I could take the call, and the president and I had a nice conversation about how I’d be more in Florida.”
As evidence that Trump and Doocy enjoy a nice relationship, the president recorded a farewell note from the Oval Office which was aired just before the 9:00 AM hour.
Trump said:
Hi Steve, it’s your all-time favorite president And I just want to congratulate you on your new and probably enhanced role. I just think you’re a fantastic guy You’ve always treated me fairly sometimes a little more fairly than other times, but that’s okay You’ve been really stellar at what you do and at your craft, and you’re going to continue. And it’s really been an honor to have spent so much time with you and watching you and the whole group in the morning. It’s the number one show in the business, and it’s going to stay that way for a long time to come. And you were a big part of it. So thank you for all of your service, because truly, it was service. You’ve worked so hard. And now you’re gonna have another different dimension at Fox and who knows maybe it’s gonna be even bigger and better But you are a very very good man and your son is gonna represent you Well Peter’s of equal talent at least in fact you would say he’s even better than you So just take care of yourself say hello to your family especially your wife I know she’s gonna. Be feeling better really soon, and you’re a special guy. Thank you very much Steve.
Doocy’s departure from the curvy couch for the wild west of America’s diners and pickle ball courts is sure to sadden longtime viewers of Fox & Friends, but it makes sense both from a programming perspective (four is a crowd) and for the host himself, who just welcomed a new grandchild, to Fox News reporters Peter Doocy and Hillary Vaughn.
“I am almost certain that a lot of the segments we wind up doing — traveling with my wife Kathy — will be near DC and Dallas, where I have grandkids,” Doocy said. “And there is a decent chance those segments will end up with a grandkid sitting on my lap.”
Watch above via Fox News.
