From the "So Desperate to Get Back on Fox You Can Smell It" Files: Megyn Kelly

 

“There is no question the media represented it as so much worse than it actually was,” Megyn Kelly said about the Capitol riot.

Videos from Jan. 6 show violent attacks on officers, vandalized offices, and an attempt to find and hang former VP Pence. https://t.co/N285veyOr6

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) July 13, 2021

Let's start, for reasons which will become clear, with this breaking news from 2016/17 via Wikipedia

On October 22, 2016, AT&T reached a deal to buy Time Warner for $85.4 billion. The merger would bring Time Warner's properties under the same umbrella as AT&T's telecommunication holdings, including satellite provider DirecTV. The deal faced criticism for the possibility that AT&T could use Time Warner content as leverage to discriminate against or limit access to the content by competing providers.

On February 15, 2017, Time Warner shareholders approved the merger. On February 28, Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai refused to review the deal, leaving the review to the Department of Justice. On March 15, 2017, the merger was approved by the European Commission.[79] On August 22, 2017, the merger was approved by the Mexican Comisión Federal de Competencia. On September 5, 2017, the merger was approved by the Chilean Fiscalía Nacional Económica.     

Yep.  Four years ago, the galaxy brains at telecom colossus AT&T decided to shell out more money than God to buy their way into the streaming media market by buying Time Warner.   

And yet, four years later...(from CNET, March 2021): 

AT&T to refocus on 5G as it unloads WarnerMedia

The telecom giant is shifting gears back to what it probably should have been concentrating on in the first place.

And this dynamic, on a much smaller scale, is the story of Megyn Kelly.  Because, like WarnerMedia, Kelly is a media property, willing cynically to buy and sell herself to the highest bidder based on the equally cynical interests of the media corporations who are willing to bid on that property.

And so, once Fox New's #1 customer made her continued employment at that racist shithole network untenable (Variety, September 2017) -- 

Megyn Kelly Says She Left Fox News Because of Trump

-- NBC swooped in to pick up her contract in what literally everyone except NBC president Andy Lack knew was a godawful idea.  But since NBC/MSNBC are driven by their relentless search --

-- for new ways to coax the Pig People into tuning in, in January of 2017...

NBC’s Hiring of Megyn Kelly Appears to Signal a Shift to the Right

After months of negotiations with a number of major networks, Fox News star Megyn Kelly announced on Tuesday that she is joining NBC News, where she will host a daytime TV show and a weekly feature program, as well as being involved in the network’s political coverage.

Kelly’s contract with Fox News isn’t officially up until July, but she began discussions in October with several broadcasters after a widely-reported tiff with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump boosted her public profile. It’s not clear what NBCUniversal will be paying her, but she was reportedly making $15 million a year at Fox...

And just like the AT&T/WarnerMedia deal, it quickly became obvious that this pricey shotgun marriage was doomed.  Because despite Kelly's patently faked enthusiasm for her new gig and her protestations that she "just wanting to do the news", you can take the blonde wingnut pit viper out of Fox, but you can't  take the Fox out of the blonde wingnut pit viper.  And so, a year and a half after buying Megyn Kelly, NBC let her out of her contract and let her keep the nearly $70M that Andy Lack had pissed away on what, let me repeat, literally everyone except NBC president Andy Lack knew was a terrible idea going in.  From NBC, October 2018:

Megyn Kelly walks away from NBC with the remainder of her $69M deal

The announcement comes months after negotiations over Kelly's contract following her termination for making derogatory racial comments.

Megyn Kelly and NBC News have agreed to terms under which the high-profile TV host will leave the company with the remainder of her $69 million contract, according to a source familiar with the agreement.

The news comes after months of negotiations over parts of Kelly’s long-term contract following her removal in October from the 9 a.m. ET hour of NBC’s “Today.” Her morning show, “Megyn Kelly Today,” was cancelled after the anchor made comments about wearing blackface as part of a Halloween costume debate.

“The parties have resolved their differences, and Megyn Kelly is no longer an employee of NBC,” NBC said in a statement...

Because big media does not give the tiniest shit about our lives, our futures or the survival of our democracy.  Big media is a business, and as The New Yorker wrote in October 2018: 

NBC’s Firing of Megyn Kelly Is as Cynical as Her Hiring Was.

...

“There is no other way to put this, but I condemn [Megyn Kelly's blackface] remarks,” Andy Lack, the chairman of NBC news, said at a staff meeting this week. Lack has reason to cast the Kelly implosion as a moral crisis that he’s eager to fix. 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. At Fox News, Kelly had provided a more stylish iteration of the network’s typically unhinged anti-black programming. 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.

/Start  of brief driftglass aside

Just imagine what investing that $70M -- which is sofa change to media corporation the size of NBC -- in actual Liberal media might have done for our politics?  

Hell, just imagine what putting actual Liberals who had been right about the Right all along on the air instead of spamming audiences with an endless procession of Republican Bush Regime Dead Enders  all of whom swear they simultaneously discovered to their shock in 2016 that the Republican Party was full of Republicans, all of whom tell the most amazing lies about why they are not to blame for the state of the modern GOP, and all of whom clearly have not lost one iota of their seething contempt for you and me and everything we believe in.

End of brief driftglass aside/

And so, $69M dollars wealthier for failing spectacularly at her one job and released from her contractual obligation to  pretend she didn't hate every minute she spent working at NBC, Megyn Kelly was free to used her continued media presence to shit on her former colleagues.  Which isn't to say they don't deserve it, but still, classy with a "K" Megyn is (from The Daily Beast, December 2019):

Megyn Kelly Calls Out Former NBC Colleagues in New Interview

The ex-Fox News and NBC host appears to suggest that unlike her, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are not real “journalists.”

Then, less than a year ago, Kelly decided that the world should not be forced to go without her voice for even one more day, which is how she decided to spend a chunk of her NBC please-go-away money to get into the exciting and extremely profitable world of...podcasting!   From The WSJ from September 2020.

Megyn Kelly Launches Into Podcasting With New Venture 

 

Former TV news star’s Devil May Care Media will begin releasing ‘The Megyn Kelly Show’ at the end of the month

Megyn Kelly is coming back on the air, but this time she’ll be podcasting.

The former TV news commentator and talk-show host’s new Devil May Care Media is slated to release the first episode of “The Megyn Kelly Show” at the end of the month. Ms. Kelly, 49 years old, whose most recent morning show with NBC News ended almost two years ago, is funding the venture herself.

“The No. 1 thing I wanted to do was control my own editorial,” Ms. Kelly said. “To not be doing anyone else’s bidding, not having the pressure of corporate overlords over me, that means one has to be entrepreneurial.”...

 And, of course, continue shitting on her former colleagues. From Forbes, last week:

Megyn Kelly: Working At NBC Wasn’t ‘Intellectually Stimulating’

It turns out even Megyn Kelly was confused by the transformation Megyn Kelly made in her move from Fox News to NBC. In an interview with Business Insider, the former Fox News Channel host said that her high profile jump from Fox to NBC resulted in a job that “wasn’t intellectually stimulating.”

"I had this soaring career at Fox that was great by any measure, but I was miserable at home. It was too stressful, too much time away from my family and my kids, and then I overcorrected at NBC by going too soft," Kelly told Insider...

 All of which, including her nakedly batshit remarks today, is this damaged media property's way of publicly hiking her skirt up high enough to let her former employers at Fox know that if they have the money, she has the time. 

Burn The Lifeboats