Author: Maria Puente / Source: USA TODAY
Megyn Kelly’s hour of “Today” was canceled amidst the host’s controversial comments about blackface. Wochit
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 explosive expansion of the media world she inhabits.
“She’s an anchorwoman-without-portfolio 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 straight to the internet with an online show.
She could even go back to being a lawyer. Or she could go home with millions and write another score-settling memoir about how she ended up in this predicament. No matter what, these options probably would be seen as big steps down for her.
Still, it’s hard to imagine Kelly simply fading away – not after her years bathed in the ego-stroking glow of the media spotlight.
“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. “I think the way Megyn Kelly has to contextualize this is: I’m fine with what will be perceived as backward and downward and also be aware that there aren’t that many upward and onward pathways.”
There is no getting around it, Feldstein says: Kelly, once a megastar, is now damaged goods less than two years after quitting Fox News in a huff 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 gob-smacking 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 high-profile 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 run amok. It seemed especially egregious given her history of questionable comments (such as her insistence that Santa Claus and Jesus are white) when she was at Fox.
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