Kelly’s ratings and viewership have been in decline since she débuted in the 9 A.M.
Lack’s condemnation of her now hardly obscures the fact that her firing was decided by the same cynical market considerations that led him to hire her in the first place. At Fox News, Kelly had provided a more stylish iteration of the network’s typically unhinged anti-black programming. Since the revelations of Matt Lauer’s career of impunity at the “Today” show, and of the company’s failure to follow through with Ronan Farrow’s reporting on allegations against Harvey Weinstein, the chairman’s fitness has been cast in serious doubt. Lack has reason to cast the Kelly implosion as a moral crisis that he’s eager to fix. “There is no other way to put this, but I condemn those remarks,” Andy Lack, the chairman of NBC news, said at a staff meeting this week. Her contract stipulates that she’ll be paid out: sixty-nine million dollars. On Wednesday, Kelly tried her hand at an apology, but, as tears struggled to surface in her eyes, her speech quickly broke down into a paean to “reverse racism.” On Thursday, Kelly, now separated from her talent agency, did not appear on air. “You do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface on Halloween, or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween,” she said, adding that it was “O.K.” when she was a kid. On Tuesday, in a panel segment about Halloween costumes and political correctness, Kelly had professed casual indignation that there are “rules” these days about who can dress as whom. The announcement, hardly shocking, comes after a tumultuous week for both the company and its star. On Friday, in a one-sentence memo, NBC confirmed that the “Megyn Kelly Today” hour of its morning-show program has been cancelled, and that its host will exit the network. The grand experiment is over, and it failed spectacularly.
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