Megyn Kelly said that without Tucker Carlson, who was abruptly fired from Fox News on Monday, the conservative network is in a “downward spiral” and that without its biggest star, we really “don’t need Fox anymore.”
Brian Kilmeade stepped in Monday as the slot’s first guest anchor, and ratings since then have continued to plummet, which Kelly pointed out in her Friday SiriusXM show.
“Fox News is in a downward spiral that they’re going to have to claw to get themselves out of. This is an existential crisis for the channel and its primetime, which is how they make money… They live off of their primetime and the food has dried up,” she said.
“You don’t need Fox anymore,” continued Kelly, who left Fox News in 2017. “They’re not the monopoly in conservative media that they used to be – they’re just not. And so you take away the unique voice, the one thing that really is different over there. Tucker is different, he just comes at things from different angles… They’re taking away the one unique — truly unique — draw they had.”
Kilmeade of “Fox & Friends” took over as a last-minute replacement Carlson on Monday. Curious viewers tuned in in decent numbers, averaging 2.59 million total viewers. But that dropped to 1.7 million viewers on Tuesday, and slid further to 1.33 million total viewers on Wednesday, falling just behind MSNBC in that time-slot, according to Nielsen live plus same-day figures.
Carlson’s final show on Friday, April 21, drew in 2.65 million viewers, a below-average number for “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
He and the rest of his colleagues at the network were blindsided by the news that he and Fox News were parting ways. His exit came amidst allegations of “blatant misogyny” from former news producer Abby Grossberg, who was fired after filing suit against the network.
