Six years after being shown the door by NBC News, Megyn Kelly is getting the last laugh.
Kelly made an illustrious career for herself at Fox News between 2004 and 2017, signing off as one of the network’s most popular evening anchors in history. Her departure came at the height of the #MeToo movement when allegations of sexual harassment led to the firing of Fox co-founder Roger Ailes, and she gained prominence for going public about Ailes’s attempts to forcibly kiss her and repeatedly demanding she send nude photos of herself to him. She transitioned to host and correspondent duties at NBC News but was dismissed in 2018 after comments about blackface Halloween costumes. Media reports at the time show she netted a $30 million settlement with the network as a result.
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Since then, Kelly has built her own brand on SiriusXM where “The Megyn Kelly Show” dominates satellite radio’s talk show charts. Semafor reported on the latest ratings which show the 53-year-old better positioned than ever to be one of the most influential voices in conservative news. “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 noted.
The decision to launch her own program came after a lengthy discussion with Ben Shapiro, a conservative kingmaker who launched his own company, The Daily Wire, in 2015. Kelly recounted that Shapiro convinced her that striking out on his own was the best career decision he ever made, and he’s been able to net outsized profits by streamlining his staff. “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 noted. “The Megyn Kelly Show’s YouTube channel, which has 2.3 million subscribers, had 116.8 million views in July — more views than the official channels for NBC News (78 million) CBS News (83 million), Sky News (87 million), the BBC News (72 million) and CNBC (17 million).”
Kelly still offers free partial programming on YouTube where she says her audience welcomes the familiar feel of seeing her on camera. “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.”
Separations between superstar journalists and the legacy media have become more pronounced, most notably with the 2023 termination of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. His firing came shortly after a landmark nine-figure settlement with Dominion Voting Systems to settle a lawsuit that Carlson and others used their platforms at the network to defame the company’s voting machines used in the 2020 elections. Carlson rebranded on X, releasing free hour-long shows before launching his own subscription service. He has interviewed former President Donald Trump and leading voices in conservative politics and was even rumored to be on the former president’s shortlist for a vice presidential pick.
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At the time, Kelly encouraged her former colleague to “breach the contract” binding him to Fox News, which the network attempted to enforce in a bid to sideline him through the 2024 election. “He should come out. He should talk. He should start a rival news network. He should quit. He should forfeit the money,” Kelly said. “He’ll make more money anyway.”
Media entrepreneurism is not confined to conservatives, either. Don Lemon, the longtime CNN host who was fired earlier this year for a number of crude remarks about Nikki Haley and other Republican women, has since begun to produce his own show on X until he had a falling out with owner Elon Musk following their interview. Mehdi Hasan was let go by MSNBC earlier this year and has launched his own venture as well.
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