By Lloyd Grove, 04.06.19

Nearly six months after NBC News chairman Andy Lack abruptly cancelled Megyn Kelly Today—the culmination of a series of unwelcome controversies, coupled with weak ratings, that imploded with her blurted endorsement of white people wearing Halloween blackface—the former Fox News star is starting to formulate a comeback strategy and getting ready to test the marketplace.

“Part of that readiness is just getting informed on the landscape,” said a source close to Kelly, who was reportedly paid an eye-popping $23 million a year by NBC, and is pocketing the full value of her three-year deal—an estimated $69 million—although she was taken off the air after only 17 months.

“She has always been such a hard worker. It has always been nose to the grindstone, like ‘I’ve got to put on a great show for these 60 minutes.’ So she’s never really looked up at what do new media-type things look like, what do podcasts look like, what does radio look like? So part of it is just a real broad step back and a look at media generally.”

This person added: “The urgency to fire it back up for the next day to three months is pretty low. But ever? Like in a year? Much higher. It’s not like she’s sprinting and saying ‘I gotta get there now.’ But she does want to get informed and get to a place where she can make a really good decision. So she’s sort of setting herself up for that now and patiently going about that process. But no doubt, the engines will fire up at some point.”

The 48-year-old Kelly has been “healing” and “chilling,” according to friends, since last Oct. 24, her final day of work on network television—going to yoga classes, attending school events and field trips with her kids, experimenting in the kitchen, skiing in Montana, and having date nights with her husband.

Kelly herself predicted—to a TMZ crew that miraculously ran into her one January night on an Upper East Side sidewalk—that she’ll be back on television sometime this year. The encounter was a prelude to what looked to media observers like a planted Feb. 26 Page Six item headlined “Megyn Kelly eyes October return for 2020 race.”

But it’s going to be, by most accounts, a challenging reboot.

During the 2016 presidential campaign that cast Kelly as a polarizing adversary of the eventual winner, Donald Trump, she became perhaps the biggest star in television news, worthy of a Vanity Fair cover story that celebrated her as “a newly minted role model for women… and a conservative champion who transcends politics with her skillful skewering of windbags of both parties.”

Barely two years after Kelly joined NBC News—with the sort of media fanfare generally reserved for a conquering hero—she is unemployed.

A spot survey by The Daily Beast of her most financially rewarding possible destinations—ABC, CBS, CNN—didn’t turn up any current enthusiasm for her services. At Fox News, where some former colleagues might welcome her return, a larger group both behind and in front of the camera is said to reject it out of hand.

“It would be difficult for a mainstream news network to hire her,” said a longtime industry executive, “given what she said” in the blackface controversy that cost Kelly her job, even though she made an apparently heartfelt apology both on the air and inside NBC; never mind that her African-American Today show colleagues Al Roker and Craig Melvin—and Andy Lack himself—publicly condemned Kelly’s blackface comments in the harshest of terms.

Melvin, for one, called them “ignorant and racist” as well as “stupid” and “indefensible.”

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An obvious problem when it comes to a future job in right-wing media, industry insiders said, is Kelly’s lingering public persona as an enemy of President Donald Trump—which Trump and his campaign underlings relentlessly promoted (to the point where she received credible death threats and was compelled to hire a security team) after she asked him that famous question about his misogyny at the August 2015 Fox News debate.

Requesting anonymity, several industry insiders speculated that Fox News, which critics have tagged as both the president’s principal policy adviser as well as an extension of the Trump propaganda machine, could nevertheless be a logical destination for Kelly.

After all, she spent a dozen years there under the tutelage of Fox News founder Roger Ailes (whom she ultimately accused of sexually harassing her when she was a cub reporter in Washington), and she thrived in primetime with her 9 p.m. program The Kelly File.

“This woman needs a show on Fox News and she will do great,” said a television insider. “I would take Megyn Kelly on in a heartbeat. She’s polarizing, but so was Bill O’Reilly. And guess where polarizing personas succeed? Cable news, and Fox News in particular. She’s already got the familiarity there, and not everybody who watches Fox News is blindly in love with Donald Trump—which is where she first alienated that audience. I do not understand—other than the Murdoch pride factor—why they wouldn’t rehabilitate her and bring her back.”

As Kelly was considering her professional future in late 2016, Rupert Murdoch publicly expressed his desire that she remain; rumors circulated internally at Fox News—stoked by Kelly, some suspected—that Rupert, Lachlan and James Murdoch had offered her a long-term contract worth $100 million, an offer she ultimately spurned.

In recent months, however, Kelly has been sending what media observers see as signals that she would not be averse to a Fox News homecoming. At the web site Mediaite’s holiday party in December, she was seen in convivial conversation with Sean Hannity, an erstwhile rival at the Murdoch cable network.

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Kelly is said not to regret her decision to leave for NBC, even though her Sunday magazine show, her initial project there during the summer of 2017, was cancelled after a mere eight of 10 planned episodes. Even Kelly is said to accept that her efforts to reinvent herself as a homey, female-friendly morning television host were less than successful.

Within Fox News, it is at best a minority view that Kelly could attract better ratings at 7 p.m. than Martha MacCallum’s The Story—which decisively beats the cable competition, but, like its 7 p.m. rivals, has experienced a falloff in the 25-54 age demographic on which news advertising is sold. That scenario, in any case, would appear to be a non–starter.

“As we have said numerous times, we are extremely happy with every hour of our line-up and we have no intention of making any changes to it,” a Fox News spokesperson told The Daily Beast.

Indeed, the door at Fox, for now anyway, seems to be slammed shut. Lachlan Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of Fox News’s corporate parent Fox Corp. (the new Murdoch-controlled company that emerged after Disney recently bought 21st Century Fox’s film studio and other entertainment assets) said as much last November.

“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,” Murdoch told CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook conference. “Having said that, I’m very happy with our current lineup on Fox, and we won’t be making any changes there.”

“Is she damaged because of of this whole experience?” Sorkin asked.

“Sure,” Murdoch answered. “I think she is.”

“Do you think she can go back into media after this?”

“I hope she does because she’s very talented.”

Fox Corp.’s chief spokesperson, Executive Vice President Hope Hicks, the former White House communications director and Donald Trump confidante, this week emailed The Daily Beast: “No change.”

While acknowledging Kelly’s obvious talents as a sharp-witted interviewer and on-camera pugilist who possesses a flair for drama and a face for television, most industry insiders agreed that Kelly would be a risky hire, given the negative narratives that have attached to her image like barnacles.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-meg...ight-wing-media

Kelly is one of the earliest casualties of the Never Trump, neo-con movement. Bill Krystol, founder of the now defunct political magazine The Weekly Standard is another. I have NO SYMPATHY for these people's plight. Only disgust.

How can anyone feel sorry for Megyn Kelly? She not only turned on Trump, she turned on FOX, where she was given so much. She turned her back on them and then made so much money doing it! Sympathy? No Way! TM

"$23 million a year by NBC, and is pocketing the full value of her three-year deal—an estimated $69 million"