Megyn Kelly is killing it at Fox News. That fact might start to worry her lead-in, cable-news king Bill O’Reilly.
A little more than a year into her role as a primetime host in the 9 p.m. slot, Kelly seems to have repaired the ratings damage that proved the undoing of Sean Hannity.
In late 2013, Fox, still handily beating CNN and MSNBC overall but suffering some loss in viewership, announced its first major primetime shake-up in a decade.
Gone was the newsier “Fox Report with Shepard Smith” at 7 p.m., replaced by Greta Van Susteren’s conversational grab-bag. Hannity was, as the Hollywood Reporter put it, “shuffle[d] off to lower expectations at 10 p.m.” That left an opening for a new show, “The Kelly File.”
Where Hannity offered 9 p.m. viewers a steady diet of Republican talking points delivered with absolute predictability, Kelly’s approach is a low tolerance for guests talking around pointed questions.
The style was memorably captured in an interview with Dick Cheney, wherein Kelly told the former Republican vice president that he “got it wrong” on the invasion of Iraq.
Before the primetime shuffle, Lloyd Grove at the Daily Beast questioned whether Megyn Kelly is “pushing Sean Hannity out of Fox News primetime.”
“In recent sweeps periods — especially after Fox News chairman Ailes choreographed the 2008 departure of Hannity’s liberal-Democrat foil, Alan Colmes, and then, of course, the shocking results of the 2012 presidential election — his stats have been trending downward and older,” Grove wrote.
“The Kelly File” is the anti-“Hannity.” It’s mostly centered on advancing the day’s news with intensive interviews that don’t echo the GOP’s train of thought (though, more often than not, Kelly seems to come down on the conservative side of things).
The guests are different, and — there’s no way around this — the host is younger and more attractive. Hannity is nearly 10 years Kelly’s senior.
Then there’s O’Reilly. In November, Kelly beat the 8 p.m. ratings juggernaut in the coveted 25-54 demographic for the entire month. O’Reilly maintained his place as No. 1 with total viewers, but the median age of his audience is 72 years old. His viewers are almost literally dying.
With Hannity pushed to the back of the lineup and Kelly trouncing O’Reilly, more changes wouldn’t come as a surprise at Fox.
When the Washington Examiner requested a Kelly Q&A, a Fox News spokeswoman offered a simple “we’ll pass.”
