Megyn Kelly is having the last laugh, six years after being fired by NBC News.
Between 2004 and 2017, Kelly established an impressive career for herself at Fox News, concluding as one of the most well-liked nightly anchors in the history of the network. She left Fox at the height of the #MeToo movement, when co-founder Roger Ailes was fired due to charges of sexual harassment. She became well-known for disclosing that Ailes had tried to kiss her against her will and had demanded several times that she email him pictures of herself in her underwear. She moved to NBC News as an anchor and journalist, however her remarks regarding blackface Halloween costumes led to her termination in 2018. She reportedly received a $30 million settlement from the network as a result, according to media reports at the time.
Since then, Kelly has developed her own brand on SiriusXM, where “The Megyn Kelly Show” is the most popular talk show on satellite radio. According to Semafor, the 53-year-old is in a better position than ever to be one of the most significant voices in conservative news, based on the most recent ratings. “According to audience figures highlighted by Kelly’s team for Semafor, Kelly’s show is now not only one of the most listened-to programs on SiriusXM, but it’s also one of the top ten podcasts in the country and its viewership is eclipsing that of some mainstream news outlets on YouTube,” the outlet stated, citing audience figures provided by Kelly’s team for Semafor.
After a protracted conversation with conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who founded his own business, The Daily Wire, in 2015, she decided to start her own show. Kelly recalled that Shapiro persuaded her that going it alone was the best professional move he had ever made, and that by cutting costs, he had been able to generate enormous profits. “Kelly boasts that despite the fact that she only has six staffers, she has managed to get numbers that put her in the range of the accounts of legacy media outlets,” Semafor said. The official channels for NBC News (78 million), CBS News (83 million), Sky News (87 million), BBC News (72 million), and CNBC (17 million) were outperformed by The Megyn Kelly Show’s 2.3 million-subscriber YouTube channel, which garnered 116.8 million views in July.
Kelly claims that her audience enjoys the comfortable feeling of watching her on camera, and she continues to provide free partial programming on YouTube. “On-camera is how people are used to getting their news from me, so it likely feels familiar,” she told the outlet. She joked, “I am also half Italian, half Irish, so if you choose to watch the show, you will definitely glean something from the hand gestures and facial expressions that you might not always pick up on from listening alone. With the news what it is these days, sometimes an eye-roll, forehead slap, or pen-throw is absolutely required.”
Superstar journalists and the traditional media are becoming increasingly distant from one another; this was seen in 2023 when Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News personality, was fired. His dismissal coincided with the historic nine-figure settlement that Dominion Voting Systems and Carlson reached to resolve a lawsuit alleging that Carlson and others had used their positions at the network to disparage the company’s voting machines, which were utilized in the 2020 elections. After changing his name to Carlson, X released free one-hour shows before he started his own subscription service. He has conducted interviews with prominent figures in conservative politics, including former President Donald Trump, and there have even been rumors that he was on the former president’s shortlist for vice president.
In an effort to keep her former colleague off the air until the 2024 election, Kelly at the time urged him to “breach the contract” that kept him employed by Fox News. “He ought to emerge. He ought to speak. He ought to launch a competing news network. He ought to give up. “He ought to give up the money,” Kelly remarked. “In any case, he’ll make more money.”
Nor are media entrepreneurs exclusively conservative. After being sacked earlier this year for making several offensive comments about Nikki Haley and other Republican women, longtime CNN host Don Lemon started producing his own show on X. However, after their interview, he had a falling out with Elon Musk, the network’s owner. Mehdi Hasan started his own business after being fired by MSNBC earlier this year.
