Megyn Kelly was able to get extremely far because she had a very good PR team and neither the journalists who wrote glossy profiles about her nor the news executive who wanted to hire her ever apparently watched her Fox show.
In July 2013, when Kelly moved from an afternoon slot to Fox primetime, I wrote about the "two sides" of her work. mediamatters.org/blog/2013/07/0…
Kelly was adept at garnering viral moments by making her outwardly misogynistic Fox colleagues look like fools. Those "Megyn Moments" would get a lot of press attention. But the balance of her show was standard Fox, featuring racial fearmongering and conspiracy theories.
After she moved to primetime, she would regularly draw flattering profiles. Such coverage typically revolved around a handful of those "Moments" and her Trump confrontation. mediamatters.org/research/2016/… mediamatters.org/blog/2016/01/0…
mediamatters.org/blog/2016/04/0…
mediamatters.org/blog/2016/04/0…
Generally those profiles glossed over or entirely erased her history of race-bating and the reality that her show was typical Fox News conservative fare.
Nonetheless, as Kelly's Fox contract was wrapping up she became the subject of a bidding war. NBC backed up the money truck, giving her $69 million for three years.
Kelly was supposed to do a Sunday night newsmagazine show and a weekday morning talk show despite a lack of evidence that she was good in either role.
She was supposed to be the new Barbara Walters, but when Fox had tried her out with a broadcast interview special, the result was a total disaster: mediamatters.org/blog/2016/05/1…
Her skill-set was doing a conservative opinion show where she could frighten old white people while occasionally going viral by pointing out naked bigotry by her fellow employees. That's not really transferable to network television.
In her first appearance for NBC News, she interviewed a "Russian broadcaster" who suggested Russia hadn't tried to influence the election. He was actually a top executive at a state news agency. mediamatters.org/blog/2017/06/0…
Not a great start! After I reported that, when the segment was reaired, the broadcaster was correctly identified as working for the Russian government. But whoops!
Her Sunday night show was a boring debacle, punctuated by low ratings, a PR nightmare involving Alex Jones, and an early cancelation. The soft news was painful, the hard news didn't break ground. It was a bad scene. mediamatters.org/blog/2017/08/0…
A few months after that flopped, she kicked off her weekday morning talk show by saying she was "kind of done with politics for now," criticizing the "division" and saying she wanted to do something more "uplifting." mediamatters.org/blog/2017/09/2…
The problem, of course, is that she had built her career at Fox by stoking division, even as her PR image was something very different, and that divisiveness was actually her core skill.
Kelly's morning show was punctuated by poor ratings, a blow-up with Jane Fonda that made it impossible for her to draw guests, and her throwing a copy of The NY Times in the garbage to protest an article critical of Brett Kavanaugh. mediamatters.org/blog/2018/01/2…
These would have been great stunts on Fox News. But they weren't going to work on NBC.
Kelly's tenure at NBC appears to be coming to an end. Hopefully the next news executive who things about hiring her will actually watch a few episodes of her shows, rather than just reading her press clipping. #fin
