Megyn Kelly, the one-time golden girl of Fox News who left the network last year for a three-year, $69 million contract with NBC after a highly publicized feud with Donald Trump, is turning out to be an albatross around the Peacock Network’s neck.
From Conservative Tribune:
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published Wednesday, Kelly attributed her poor ratings performance as a morning personality on NBC’s “Today” show to viewers being unfamiliar with her true personality.
“I need to introduce myself to people who don’t know me or know some bastardized version of me that they’ve gotten from a website or a TV show,” Kelly told The Journal.
“There are definitely some who only know me through some caricature they learned about on ‘The Daily Show.’”
To put it mildly, that’s questionable.
At her peak at Fox — the most watched cable news network in the United States — Kelly had a public profile as high as any personality in the news business.
As The Hollywood Reporter noted in January 2017, shortly after the NBC contract was announced:
“A former corporate lawyer, Kelly, 46, had risen to become the biggest media star at the network after Bill O’Reilly, and her ratings during the run-up to the November election even surpassed his at times.”
That’s not a woman who needs an introduction.
Her popularity among Fox viewers — even as it was buffeted during her feud with Trump — was no doubt one reason Andrew Lack, the chairman of NBC News and MSNBC, thought she was worth stealing.
Another likely reason was Lack thought for some reason that her feud with Trump would actually draw Trump-hating viewers in, believing, like most of the entertainment world, that Americans really and truly couldn’t stand the president who somehow got elected because 63 million voters woke up in a bad mood Nov. 8, 2016, or something.
Lack was poorly, poorly mistaken.
The Wall Street Journal had the numbers:
“Since joining ‘Today,’ Ms. Kelly is averaging 2.4 million viewers an episode, 18% below what the hour was pulling in last season, according to data from Nielsen. The ratings have declined sharply for the past two months, dipping to a low of 1.9 million, after getting a lift from the network’s coverage of the Winter Olympics in February.
“Among adults aged 25 to 54, the key demographic that the show targets, ratings are down 28% since last season.”
So, what went wrong? Thomas Lifson, at American Thinker, hit the nail on the head when he chalked it up to “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
