Report: NBC in ‘Total Panic’ over Megyn Kelly’s Morning Show

NBC insiders are reportedly in “total panic” over Megyn Kelly’s new morning show that is set to debut at the end of September.

As Breitbart News has previously noted, Kelly does not have a core group of supporters except perhaps the “Never Trumpers” on Twitter and has alienated nearly everyone in her short tenure at the network. Yet, NBC decided to, for some reason, hitch Today’s star to Kelly’s wagon and name her new show Megyn Kelly Today.

According to the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove, network insiders are asking serious questions about “who her audience is exactly” and panicking about the potential disaster Kelly could be for the network’s crown-jewel franchise.

The disastrous ratings for Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly, which was pulled at least two episodes sooner than planned because Kelly kept setting viewership lows, revealed all of Kelly’s glaring weakness and showed how limited her reach is.

“The Sunday show laid such an egg that any claims that she had automatic star power, to get people in the door to see what she was doing, have been disavowed,” television news analyst Andrew Tyndall told Grove.

Grove reported that “some NBC insiders are expressing doubts, and even worries, about the network news division’s plan to scrap a reliable long-running program in order to morph into an accessible, female-friendly personality for an ethnically diverse daytime viewership.”

As Variety has suggested, Kelly’s insistence that Santa Claus is white may have done her no favors with Latina and black American viewers who watch daytime television. Variety pointed out that, according to Nielsen data for the 2015-2016 television season, “African-American women comprised 23.1% of the total TV audience in the (nearly synchronous) 7 a.m.- 3 p.m. time frame, making them the largest component of the daytime viewership base, ahead of white (16.3%), Hispanic (12.6%) and Asian (7.6%) women.”

Of course, Kelly’s problems are compounded when one considers liberal white women who watch daytime television cannot stand Fox News and Kelly’s association with the network. In addition, many middle-class women in Trump country loathe her as well.

NBC, perhaps momentarily caught up in its anti-Trump hysteria, may not have realized, as many have joked, that Fox News viewers simply left their televisions on after Bill O’Reilly and before Sean Hannity while they did their dishes, laundry, or other things on their to-do lists.

But Kelly, completely lacking self-awareness, may have had an inflated sense of her star power. She laughingly told Alex Jones that she thought she was a combination of Mike Wallace, Oprah Winfrey, and Larry the Cable Guy. But as Breitbart News noted, Kelly’s “newsmagazine show quickly revealed that she did not have Wallace’s intellect and sense, Winfrey’s warmth and empathy, and Larry the Cable Guy’s humor.”

NBC may well be aware of Kelly’s liabilities because the network has reportedly spent millions sending Kelly to affiliates and on various “humanizing” segments to promote her morning show so that she just does no harm to the Today franchise.