CLEVELAND, Ohio — All of Fox News’ primetime lineup is willing to walk out of the network with chief executive and chairman Roger Ailes if he is pushed out by Rupert Murdoch and his family, Breitbart News has confirmed.
Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Shepard Smith, Bret Baier, Eric Bolling, Neil Cavuto, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Laura Ingraham, Geraldo Rivera, Juan Williams, Jeanine Pirro, Bo Dietl, Monica Crowley, all of the Fox and Friends hosts, and at least 50 Fox News contributors are willing to depart the network if Ailes is ousted, and leave with him to form a new network, one of the network’s anchors told Breitbart News late Tuesday.
All of them stand against Megyn Kelly, and all of them stand with Roger Ailes.
This development, which has been confirmed to Breitbart News by multiple network sources, effectively boxes in those who want to remove Ailes. Either they can throw all in behind Megyn Kelly—in which case they would have to forfeit most of the rest of the network—or they can stand with the hardworking anchors and news personalities at Fox News.
“If Fox wants to become the ‘all about Megyn Network,’ that’s fine,” one top Fox News host said. “We stand with Roger. And real anger has emerged that the so-called Megyn incident happened 10 years ago. The consensus among the hosts and contributors is: ‘Why didn’t she say anything then? Really, the same woman that posed half naked in GQ? The same woman on Howard Stern saying what?’”
A second top Fox News Channel host told Breitbart News: “If Megyn Kelly wants to leave, we are fine with that. Good riddance.”
The fact that nearly the entire network is willing to walk out over this, and support Ailes over Kelly is significant in that they have banded together to show their strength. It will harder than ever now for the Murdochs to side with Kelly over Ailes, especially with the lack of any evidence of her allegations–and the fact that Kelly waited 10 years to say anything about this evidence-less supposed incident.
Most people at the Fox News Channel are extraordinarily offended that Kelly made Tuesday—the day Donald J. Trump because the official Republican nominee—all about herself. Multiple sources can’t believe she did this today of all days.
Other network sources say that this all about Megyn Kelly’s plans to get a Hillary Clinton interview, but she has already lost out on that front as both Baier and O’Reilly have gotten such interviews ahead of her–and both of theirs were better than she could ever do.
Trump, the billionaire real estate developer who has shaken the political world’s grounding in the United States for over a year now, has officially won the Republican nomination. But what is the biggest story in American politics, as Trump went from presumptive to actual GOP presidential nominee on Tuesday night? That one of America’s two major political parties has officially selected a businessman who has never held elected office before as its official presidential nominee, an earth-shattering development in American politics? No, it’s Megyn Kelly, who has yet again found a way to worm her way to the top of the news cycle ahead of the potential next President of the United States of America.
Kelly has for a year battled with Trump, throughout the Republican primaries and since then. She came at him with roundly criticized gotcha questions in the first GOP presidential debate here last August. She touted reports falsely accusing him of raping his ex-wife, and then didn’t back down from them. She regularly sparred with Trump over the ensuing next several months, and used her show to promote the so-called “Never Trump” collective—something that as shown here at the GOP convention as Trump easily wrapped up the nomination never amounted to an actual “movement.”
Trump skipped a debate in Iowa over Fox News’ decision to keep her on as an anchor. And she pushed the now widely discredited narrative that Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s now former campaign manager, somehow assaulted Michelle Fields. Police even wasted taxpayer resources to investigate the matter.
So, sure enough, as Trump wins the nomination, Kelly finds a way to commandeer the news cycle to put herself not just in the middle of the story—but to make all the news about her. Over the past few weeks, unsubstantiated allegations have emerged from Gretchen Carlson—a now former Fox News anchor—that Roger Ailes, the network’s chief executive and chairman, allegedly made sexual advances against her.
The news cycle on that matter seemed to fizzle away heading into the GOP convention here, though, as Carlson provided no evidence to back up her thus far unsubstantiated allegations while evidence of anti-Fox News and political biases from her attorney did surface. Carlson’s attorney, as Breitbart News uncovered, made tens of thousands of dollars in political donations to progressive Democrats with a penchant for publicly criticizing Fox News and Ailes. Meanwhile, a bevy of current and former Fox News anchors and contributors of their own volition began publicly speaking out in defense of Ailes ranging from Greta Van Susteren to Maria Bartiromo to Kimberly Guilfoyle and many more.
As Ailes seemed to be out of the woods, and the story seemed to be dying down, one question lingered as 15,000 mainstream media reporters—all of whom despise the Fox News Channel and Ailes—descended on Cleveland: Why hadn’t Megyn Kelly said anything?
Then, all of a sudden, Kelly dropped the bomb.
In comments to the outside firm investigating the matter, according to New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman—an anti-Ailes agitator in the mainstream media—Kelly alleged that Ailes sexually harassed her. She and her attorneys have, sources say, manipulated her way in a manner that rival Claire Underwood of the hit Netflix drama House of Cards. “Even her haircut looks like Robin Wright [the actress who plays the ruthless First Lady in the series],” said one source in Cleveland. “She’s a woman who not just will do anything for power, but anything to make it all about her.”