Megyn Kelly Ratings Take Hit, Then She Announces She Will Not Be on the Air Next Week
As news dropped this week that NBC host Megyn Kelly’s ratings have slipped even further, the host announced she would be off air next Sunday.
Formerly with Fox News, the rebranded journalist and commentator now hosts “Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly,” a series on NBC where she interviews a prominent social or political figure each week.
Her first interview on June 4 with Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly bombed hard, drawing about 6.1 million viewers, coming in behind the 6.6 million viewers who opted for a rerun of “60 Minutes” on CBS.
As noted by Newsweek, the host’s ratings have continued to decline ever since:
“According to Nielsen, the company that collects viewership data, last Sunday’s episode, which featured Kelly interviewing Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, garnered only 3.4 million viewers. The week before, she courted furious anger from a variety of groups by interviewing the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Yet that saw a viewership of only 3.6 million.”
Given these numbers, the announcement she made on Twitter this Sunday seems suspicious, to say the least.
“We’ll be off next #SundayNight, but here’s a look at some of the stories coming up this summer,” she wrote.
We’ll be off next #SundayNight, but here’s a look at some of the stories coming up this summer pic.twitter.com/0znnpVAOTg
— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) June 26, 2017
Even odder is that the first season of her show will reportedly culminate on July 9, meaning she will have completed only four interviews. She has been interviewing powerful figures, but still, it makes one wonder, especially considering the intense criticism she has received thus far.
In a scathing review for Variety magazine published last week, Sonia Saraiya slammed Kelly for being “disappointing,” not to mention a “disaster” of an interviewer who “is didactic without being trustworthy” but also “patronizing without being impressive.”
Matthew Gilbert’s criticism was even less forgiving.
“There’s something stubbornly shallow about her presence, so that when she sits down with an international dodge artist like Vladimir Putin, she seems way out of her league,” he wrote for The Boston Globe
Ouch.
Criticism from the right has been just as ruthless, due in large part to the sense of betrayal many conservatives feel over the journalist’s decision earlier this year to ditch Fox News in search of fame and fortune.
It’s rather sad, really. While Kelly has always had her enemies, she was nevertheless loved and appreciated by at least some of Fox News’ die-hard fans. But instead of sticking with them, she left the network, naively believing the grass would be greener on the other side at a liberal network. She thought wrong — very wrong.
So now, instead of being disliked by mainly those on the left, she’s disliked by everyone, including even Vladimir Putin, apparently.
“Why do you feel you have the right to ask us these kinds of questions and do it all the time to moralize and give us lessons on how to live?” he scolded her during their interview earlier this month.
“One is the loneliest number,” the rock band Three Dog Night once sang.
I’m sure Megyn Kelly knows all about that …
H/T Sarah Palin