USA TODAY International Edition
Retiring? ‘Not in the cards’ What’s next for Megyn Kelly?
Options are limited for the former media star
Where do you go after you’ve been at the top and fallen to the depths?
Megyn Kelly, just fired from NBC’s “Today” show, is probably asking herself that question now – and finding that her options are limited despite the expansion of the media world.
“She’s an anchorwoman-withoutportfolio and without a home – she’s stateless now,” says Mark Feldstein, a broadcast journalism professor at the University of Maryland who spent two decades in TV news for ABC, CNN and local news stations.
“She may be fine (financially) with all the money she’s saved, but there are not a lot of options for her, and I’m sure they’re very unappealing options for someone with the money and visibility she’s used to having.”
No other mainstream news network is likely to take her, and her previous home at Fox News is not interested. She could move to Fox Nation, the network’s new streaming service launching Nov. 27, or to the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the emerging conservative network of local TV stations. She could host a new syndicated show tailored to her particular personality or follow the example of her former Fox colleague, Bill O’Reilly, and go with an online show.
She could go back to being a lawyer. Or she could go home with millions and write another memoir about how she ended up in this predicament.
Still, it’s hard to imagine Kelly simply fading away.
“Once they (media stars) get a taste of TV, they’re like vampires – they can’t go back to anonymity. Their psyches won’t allow it,” Feldstein says.
Judy Muller, a longtime former ABC correspondent who is now a journalism professor emerita at the University of Southern California, says that for TV people, ego and professional prestige often outweigh mere money.
“But just going home and retiring? It’s not in the cards,” Muller predicts of Kelly. “The good news for (her) is that there are so many more (news) outlets than there used to be. It’s going to be humbling no matter what she does.”
Robert Thompson, head of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University and a veteran pop culture tracker, acknowledges the vastly expanded media universe but still believes Kelly’s options are “really, really limited” given that her previously upward career trajectory is likely to be perceived as halted if not reversed. “The question becomes, where do you go that is not seen as a plummet from where you were headed?” Thompson says.
There’s no getting around it, Feldstein says: Kelly, once a megastar, is now damaged goods less than two years after quitting Fox News and moving to NBC News with ambitions for an Oprah Winfrey-style career and brand change. She took over the 9 a.m. “Today” show slot with her own talk show and a gobsmacking multimillion-dollar salary, but she failed to fit in with an NBC staff suspicious of her signature icy conservatism, which was so successful at Fox. After criticizing her NBC bosses for their handling of the Matt Lauer sexual misconduct debacle, after conflicts with some guests and after her ratings began plunging, it all came to tears last week.
In remarks that were clueless at best, racist at worst, Kelly suggested (to an all-white panel of guests) that being offended by blackface in a Halloween costume is merely political correctness. It seemed egregious given her history of questionable comments (such as her insistence that Santa Claus and Jesus are white) when she was at Fox.
Instantly, the Twitterverse – and NBC – told her she was wrong. At the very least, it was a remark that revealed ignorance, Muller says. “You can’t be a head of show like that for that kind of money and be stupid. (NBC) didn’t buy stupid. The minute she said that, they had no choice.”
The next day, Kelly acknowledged she was wrong in an on-air apology followed by a multiracial panel discussion.
“Maybe she lives in such a bubble she didn’t understand how radioactive her comments would be,” Feldstein says.
The death spiral
Already alarmed at Kelly’s ratings and their fallout, NBC bosses canceled her show, and she and her lawyer, Bryan Freedman, began negotiating the terms of her slow-motion departure.
Meanwhile, Kelly is begging for privacy, describing on Twitter how paparazzi are staking out her home. She accused the British tabloid “The Daily Mail” of photographing her husband inside their home and recording her 7year-old daughter at her school.
The good news for Kelly: A Hollywood Reporter/Morning Consult survey published Tuesday found that nearly half of the 2,201 adults polled believed that NBC’s decision to cancel “Megyn Kelly Today” was “too harsh.”
So now what? The obvious option: Return to Fox News, where her personality was once popular. But Fox nixed that option.
On Thursday, Fox co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch made it official at the annual New York Times DealBook conference. “Look, I’m a big fan of Megyn’s. I like her a lot. We didn’t want her to leave Fox when she did,” he said. “Having said that, I’m very happy with our current lineup on Fox, and we won’t be making any changes there.”
It probably didn’t help that Kelly left Fox after challenging President Donald Trump’s attitudes toward women and after she accused Fox honchos of sexual harassment in a tell-all memoir.
“She’s down to only a handful of options because she burned her bridges at Fox and the related segment of the right-wing media, and she burned her bridges at NBC and all of the mainstream media,” Feldstein says.
She would have to mend fences with Fox if she wants to return there or to Fox Nation. But “maybe Fox won’t take her now because people there felt personally betrayed by her defection,” Feldstein says. She may have settle for a lowerkey job elsewhere long enough for Fox to embrace her later, he adds.
But no other mainstream network or media operation (say, Netflix) will want to take a chance on her if it will be seen as tolerating the kind of remarks that got her fired from NBC, Thompson says. “None of them are going to want to send a message that ‘our standards are lower,’ ” he says.
A syndicated show might work, with her Oprah ambitions, but building a network of affiliates is easier said than done, Thompson says: “Many are called to be Oprah, few are chosen.”
And it would still be seen as a step down for her – unless it was spectacularly successful the way, say, Jerry Springer was successful.
“Something designed for her would be what she was doing at Fox, so maybe she could take what she learned from the NBC experience and try to adjust that and come up with a ‘new’ Megyn Kelly show that is more like Megyn Kelly,” Thompson says.
Another consideration for potential Kelly employers is, aside from her blackface remarks, “Megyn Kelly Today” just wasn’t that successful as a morning show as demonstrated by the ratings.
The most successful morning hosts are warm and fuzzy; Kelly is cool and sharp. If she thought she could rebrand herself, she was wrong – and so was Andrew Lack, the NBC News president who hired her. It’s a lesson for her and for other potential employers.
“You can’t take someone from Fox who is attractive and had following there and drop her into something else that doesn’t suit her,” Muller says. “And if she makes a stupid mistake, they all wonder what went wrong?”
The reason for Kelly’s falling ratings was obvious, Thompson says: “That show was sometimes painful to watch. She wanted to do an Oprah-style show, and she did it really, really badly.
“As good as she was at the format she had at Fox, if I were an NBC executive watching, I would put a big part of the (calculus for firing her) at the ratings not being good and the show not being good.”