According to reports, Megyn Kelly has been hoping to return to Fox News since before the "blackface" debacle - but Fox News doesn’t want her back.

As I’ve repeatedly suggested, Kelly seems to have created quite a few “Megyn moments” aimed at catching the approving eye of Fox News of late. If there’s one thing Kelly excels at, it’s creating “Megyn moments” designed to get attention. I suspect her “blackface” fiasco was part of the same effort, except that this one backfired and blew up in her face.

Yesterday, reporter Gabriel Sherman confirmed my hunches in Vanity Fair:

Weeks before the blackface imbroglio that resulted in her being pulled off the air, Megyn Kelly was looking for a way out of NBC. Her relationship with the peacock network had badly soured—in truth, it had never been good—and Kelly told friends she wanted to return to Fox News, according to two Fox News sources familiar with her thinking. “She wants to come back,” a person close to Kelly told me. Over the past month, according to two sources with knowledge of Kelly’s programming decisions, she made comments on air that would burnish her right-wing credentials for a prospective Fox homecoming. For instance, she vigorously defended Brett Kavanaugh on multiple occasions, calling Dr. Christine Blasey Ford a “Democrat donor” who was represented by a “well-known Democratic activist.”

Would Fox take her? The answer right now appears to be no. Sherman notes that Kelly has antagonized the Murdochs by rejecting their $25 million a year in favor of moving to NBC and that she has antagonized her former coworkers there by exploiting her feud with Donald Trump and the sexual harassment accusations against former CEO Roger Ailes to burnish her phony “independent journalist” image.

Then there’s the question of how Kelly would fit in with the network that is now Trump TV. Even as she attacked Kavanaugh’s detractors, Kelly took a mocking swipe at Trump, making it clear she’s still not a fan. Trump world seems to dislike her just as much. The Daily Beast wrote about Kelly’s dim prospects of returning to Fox:

For one thing, there is no room for her on the programming lineup. “We are extremely happy with our entire lineup,” Fox News said in a statement. For another, she left the top-rated cable outlet amid a series of controversies—including her accusation against the disgraced Ailes—that left a bad taste among some of her colleagues.

“This is what happens when you tilt the universe with lies @ Megynkelly,” tweeted @DarlaShine, which was the account of Darla Shine—the wife of White House communications director Bill Shine, who was Ailes’ second-in-command when Kelly worked at Fox—that she deleted after previous highly controversial comments and recently reactivated.

Bill Shine is not just a high-level Trump official and Ailes ally, he’s a pal of Sean Hannity, Trump’s “unofficial chief of staff” and the unofficial head of FNC these days.

However, Kelly does have at least one Fox person in her corner, as you can see in the tweet below:

Since she’s made an apparently heartfelt apology for grossly misguided remarks, how about showing some mercy to an otherwise good person?Hope she comes back to Fox.

— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) October 25, 2018

Crossposted at News Hounds.
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