Fox’s Bill Hemmer on Anchoring From the Studio During Covid, the Cable News Landscape, and Why He’s ‘Bearish’ on New York

“It’s an experience I’ll never forget,” says Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer, when I ask about what it was like working from the network’s barren headquarters in midtown Manhattan throughout the coronavirus pandemic, while most cable news hosts continue to broadcast from home studios.

Hemmer, who was recently named co-anchor of 9 a.m. show America’s Newsroom alongside Dana Perino, joined me on this week’s episode of The Interview. We discussed his career, the new show, the cable news competition, the controversy generated by Fox’s opinion hosts, and his steadfast insistence on anchoring from the studio for the last year.

“I don’t say this lightly. We are in the middle of perhaps the biggest story of our lives,” Hemmer said. “And I think everything in your life will be determined by the following thought: What happened pre-Covid, what happened post-Covid, and what happened during Covid. And we are still in that DC period. And I think that’s a big way that we’re going to look at our lives after this.”

The Fox News anchor also thinks Covid will change the cable news industry.

“When we come out of it, TV is going to be different,” he said. “You’re going to accept the Skype call. Well, this is just this just the way we do it now.”

I asked Hemmer about New York, a city he has adored since moving here from Atlanta in 2003 (In the words of Hemmer’s former CNN co-host Daryn Kagan: “If New York were a woman, Bill would marry her.”)

“I got a lot of feelings on that,” Hemmer says when I bring up New York, and the energy that has returned to the city in the last few weeks.

“I’m bearish on the city,” Hemmer said. “A lot of people tell me I’m wrong about that. I hope I am. It was two years after 9/11 to recover. It was two years after ’08, ’09 for the recession to recover. Maybe it’s two years now. Maybe it’s more. I’m not sure.”

Unlike some of his colleagues on Fox News, Hemmer avoided criticizing CNN, a network he worked at for nearly a decade earlier in his career. And in keeping with the Fox News anchor tradition of dismissing questions from annoying media reporters about the network’s opinion side, Hemmer said he was not bothered by the controversy generated by Fox’s top hosts.

“Does it bother me? No, because I know these people personally. I understand that they’re very good at the job that they do,” he said.

“Tucker and Sean and Laura are three of the best hosts you’re going to find in the industry, and they produced the show, they won every day, and if you want to watch, it is there for you.”

Download the full episode now, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Correction: A previous version of this story said that Bill Hemmer moved to New York from Washington D.C. He actually moved from Atlanta.