Another day, another terrible review for NBC News talent Megyn Kelly in the establishment media.
The Boston Globe’s television critic Matthew Gilbert ripped Kelly for lacking both the charisma and acumen to be successful at NBC News.
After watching the first three poorly-rated episodes of Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly, he notes that charisma is a “relatively hard quality to define” and points out that “Merriam-Webster actually resorts to the supernatural in its first definition of the word: ‘A personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure.’”
“All I know is that I don’t find Megyn Kelly charismatic. She has no ‘personal magic,’” Gilbert writes, adding that Kelly “is lacking in that mysterious quality that engenders curiosity, excitement, and trust in a TV viewer.”
According to Gilbert, “there’s something stubbornly shallow about her presence, so that when she sits down with an international dodge artist like Vladimir Putin, she seems way out of her league.”
Kelly, according to Gilbert, “came off like a poseur” in her widely-criticized interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin by just “going through the motions of seriousness” and wound up looking “two-faced” after her disastrous interview with Alex Jones aired. After HuffPost obtained unedited footage of Kelly’s interview with Putin in which a “nervous” Kelly lobbed him “softballs,” Kelly was resoundingly mocked. And Gilbert notes that Putin “brushed her and her questions off like they were so much dandruff.”
Gilbert also says viewers can “feel the strain” as Kelly desperately tries to position herself as a serious investigative reporter.
He thinks “NBC may have goofed” and made a “giant miscalculation” when it decided to give Kelly nearly $20 million a year because she “may not have the magnetism and acumen to rise to the occasion.”
Gilbert is hardly alone in his sharp criticism of Kelly.
A television executive told CNN that NBC’s “fundamental mistake” was thinking that Kelly was a “superstar.” Variety noted that Kelly’s star is “dimmer than ever” as she has alienated everybody.
“On NBC, Kelly is didactic without being trustworthy; patronizing without being impressive. Her voiceover suggests doom without really proving it; there’s a scare-mongering side to her reportage,” Variety pointed out. “And, most importantly: She’s alienated everyone.”
Even before Kelly’s interview with Jones, NBC executives were reportedly already “freaking out” over the “ratings disaster” that has been Kelly. And after Kelly’s controversial interview with Jones again failed to beat reruns of 60 Minutes and America’s Funniest Home Videos and became Kelly’s lowest-rated program to date despite being the most hyped, a New York radio host said his sources at NBC News revealed that the network was looking to unload Kelly’s contract and may even ask Fox News to consider taking Kelly back.
But a high-ranking Fox News official told Breitbart News that Kelly “would not be welcomed back” at the network.
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