NBC cancels Megyn Kelly’s show following controversy

Whites in blackface at Halloween is OK, she had suggested.

NEW YORK — Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News Channel personality who made a rocky transition to softer news at NBC, was fired from her morning show Friday after triggering a furor by suggesting it’s OK for white people to wear blackface at Halloween.

“‘Megyn Kelly Today’ is not returning,” NBC News said in a statement. The show occupied the third hour of NBC’s “Today” program, a time slot that will be hosted by other co-anchors beginning next week, the network said.

NBC didn’t address Kelly’s future at the network. But negotiations over her exit from NBC are underway, according to a person famil- iar with the talks who wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Kelly is in the second year of a three-year contract that reportedly pays her more than $20 million a year.

A representative for Kelly did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The cancellation came four days after she provoked a firestorm for asking on the air why dressing up in blackface as part of a Halloween cos- tume is wrong. Social media condemnation was swift, and Kelly apologized to fellow NBC staffers later in the day and made a tearful apology on her show Wednesday

Kelly did not host new epi- sodes of “Megyn Kelly Today” as scheduled on Thursday and Friday.

Kelly, 47, made her debut as a NBC morning host in Septem- ber 2017, taking over the 9 a.m. slot at “Today” and saying she wanted viewers “to have a laugh with us, a smile, some- times a tear and maybe a little hope to start your day.” She did cooking demonstrations and explored emotional topics.

She largely floundered with that soft-news focus, and a pair of awkward and hostile interviews with Hollywood figures Jane Fonda and Debra Messing backfired. Kelly briefly found more of a purpose with the eruption of the #MeToo movement.

She made news when inter- viewing women who accused President Donald Trump of inappropriate behavior and spoke with accusers of Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, Roy Moore and others, as well as women who say they were harassed on Capitol Hill.

Time magazine, which hon- ored “The Silence Breakers” as its Person of the Year, cited Kelly as the group’s leader in the entertainment field. The episode with Trump accus- ers had more than 2.9 million viewers, one of her big- gest audiences.

But strains continued behind the scenes. Kelly last month publicly called for NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack to appoint outside investiga- tors to look into why the network didn’t air Ronan Far- row’s stories about Weinstein and allowed Farrow to take the material to The New Yorker.

And her ratings have been consistently down from what “Today” garnered in the 9 a.m. hour before Kelly came on board. In its first year, Kelly’s show averaged 2.4 million viewers a day, a drop of 400,000 from the year before.

The latest controversy may have tipped the balance. Both NBC’s “Nightly News” and “Today” did stories on her blackface comment, and weatherman Al Roker said Kelly “owes a big apology to people of color across the country.”

A former corporate defense attorney, Kelly made her name at Fox News discussing politics in prime time. During the first GOP debate in 2015, she asked Trump about calling women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.” Trump later complained about her questions, saying, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”

Although Kelly may have attempted a fresh start at NBC, she couldn’t always escape her baggage.

Many of her former Fox News Channel viewers were upset by her perceived disloyalty in leaving and her clashes with Trump during the campaign. At the same time, her former association with Fox caused some NBC colleagues and viewers to regard her with suspicion.

Megyn Kelly