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 furore by suggesting it was OK for white people to wear blackface at Halloween.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018Megyn Kelly Today\u2019 is not returning,\u201d NBC News said in a statement. The show occupied the fourth hour of NBC\u2019s \u201cToday\u201d program, a time slot that will be hosted by other co-anchors next week, the network said.<\/p>\n
NBC didn\u2019t address Kelly\u2019s future at the network. But negotiations over her exit from NBC are underway, according to a person familiar with the talks who wasn\u2019t authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n
Bryan Freedman, an attorney for Kelly, said in a statement that she \u201cremains an employee of NBC News and discussions about next steps are continuing.\u201d He did not elaborate.<\/p>\n
Kelly is in the second year of a three-year contract that reportedly pays her more than $20 million a year.<\/p>\n
The show\u2019s cancellation came four days after she provoked a firestorm for her on-air comments about blackface as a costume.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut what is racist?\u201d Kelly said Tuesday. \u201cTruly, you do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface at Halloween or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween. Back when I was a kid, that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.\u201d<\/p>\n
Critics accused her of ignoring the ugly history of minstrel shows and movies in which whites applied blackface to mock blacks as lazy, ignorant or cowardly.<\/p>\n
Kelly apologized to fellow NBC staffers later in the day and made a tearful apology on her show Wednesday. She did not host new episodes of Megyn Kelly Today as scheduled on Thursday and Friday.<\/p>\n
Kelly, 47, made her debut as an NBC morning host in September 2017, taking over the 9 a.m. slot at \u201cToday\u201d and saying she wanted viewers \u201cto have a laugh with us, a smile, sometimes a tear and maybe a little hope to start your day.\u201d She did cooking demonstrations and explored emotional topics.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
She made news when interviewing women who accused President Donald Trump of inappropriate behaviour and spoke with accusers of Harvey Weinstein, Bill O\u2019Reilly, Roy Moore and others, as well as women who say they were harassed on Capitol Hill.<\/p>\n
Time magazine, which honoured The Silence Breakers as its Person of the Year, cited Kelly as the group\u2019s leader in the entertainment field. The episode with Trump accusers had more than 2.9 million viewers, one of her biggest audiences.<\/p>\n
But strains continued behind the scenes. Kelly last month publicly called for NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack to appoint outside investigators to look into why the network didn\u2019t air Ronan Farrow\u2019s stories about Weinstein and allowed Farrow to take the material to The New Yorker.<\/p>\n
And her ratings have been consistently down from what \u201cToday\u201d garnered in the 9 a.m. hour before Kelly came on board. In its first year, Kelly\u2019s show averaged 2.4 million viewers a day, a drop of 400,000 from the year before.<\/p>\n
The latest controversy may have tipped the balance. Both NBC\u2019s Nightly News and \u201cToday\u201d did stories on her blackface comment, and weatherman Al Roker said Kelly \u201cowes a big apology to people of colour across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
A former corporate defence 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 \u201cfat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.\u201d Trump later complained about her questions, saying, \u201cYou could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although Kelly may have attempted a fresh start at NBC, she couldn\u2019t always escape her baggage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 furore by suggesting it was OK for white people to wear blackface at Halloween. \u201c\u2018Megyn Kelly Today\u2019 is not returning,\u201d NBC News said in a statement. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45600,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45599"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45601,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45599\/revisions\/45601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}