Former Fox News host and now independent journalist Megyn Kelly revealed that then-CNN president Jeff Zucker had made her “a huge offer” when she decided to leave Fox.
Kelly made the comment during Friday’s airing of the Megyn Kelly Show as she discussed the day’s news with radio host Buck Sexton.
According to the Daily Wire, Kelly, who left Fox News in Jan. 2017, said she turned down Zucker’s offer “because she did not believe there was an audience for her at CNN — a fact that she said veteran ‘Fox News Sunday’ host Chris Wallace was likely learning firsthand after making the jump himself.”
During the interview, Sexton, a former CIA officer in the Counterterrorism Center, said he gained insight into what was happening behind closed doors working with people across multiple networks. “This is why,” he said, he was not “shocked when CNN fired Cuomo and former network president Jeff Zucker resigned.”
Kelly was quick to mock CNN, interjecting: “Who is the moron at CNN who actually thought, ‘you know what we need with our ratings in the toilet?’ More of us. We need more CNN.”
Kelly’s comments seemed to echo that of Sirius XM host Howard Stern, who, in December, asked “why anyone would pay for more content [CNN+] from a network that nobody wanted to watch for free.”
Sexton shared in Kelly’s mockery of CNN’s dwindling ratings by joking: “I do love all of the jokes about how while Elon is offering to buy Twitter for tens of billions, there are lots of people out there right now who are willing to buy CNN+ for tens of dollars.”
When the conversation turned to Chris Wallace, who moved to CNN+ after hosting “Fox News Sunday” for 18 years, Sexton and Kelly agreed that Wallace had been lucky to keep his position despite lackluster numbers.
Sexton and Kelly assessed that “simply opposing former President Donald Trump” is not enough to “win over viewers at CNN+.”
Kelly did not express optimism when discussing Wallace’s future, suggesting that CNN likely saw Wallace as a useful “foil” when it came to Trump, but that will not translate to a massive audience.
Kelly revealed: “He was in last place every week, every year, every month. He was always in last, and they still paid him,” Kelly said, before noting her contact with CNN.
Reiterating that her main goal was to free up time for her children, Kelly said that she considered going to CNN:
I considered going to CNN. CNN made me a huge offer. Huge. I said no … because I knew: who is my fanbase going to be over there? I knew who my fans were and I knew that my Fox viewers were not going to follow me to CNN and that the CNN viewers were going to hate my guts.
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