Former top Fox News host Megyn Kelly had a word of warning for her former colleague Chris Wallace, the latter now over at CNN, and his colleague, Jim Acosta.
Kelly, in remarks during her popular podcast on SiriusXM, said that it is already too late to save CNN after its hosts “already told half the country that they hate them.”
She made her remarks in an interview with CNN commentator Mary Katharine Ham, who recently admitted she was “quiet suspended” by CNN for criticizing how the network handled the former legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin after he was caught masturbating on a ZOOM call.
“In 2015, I liked CNN a lot. They’re trying to turn things around right now. People ask me all the time: ‘Do you think CNN can be saved?'” Kelly said. “Now they have new management and new ownership and I think a new commitment to try to win back some Republican viewers.
“Personally, I think it’s too late. They’ve already told half the country that they hate them,” Kelly added.
Ham also said that at first, she liked CNN.
“It was a good time. I felt like we were presenting all the possible takes, including those from Trump-critical conservatives, which I was more on the side of, and Trump-favorable conservatives,” Ham said.
“We were fighting the good fight,” Ham went on to say before adding that then-network boss and one-time friend of Trump Jeff Zucker “was giving billions of dollars of free air time to Donald Trump.”
But she then said after Trump’s upset win in 2016 Zucker decided that “now we have to be part of rectifying the situation.”
She said “the new folks” running CNN now “are trying to bring in people who understand this other part of the country that many people on air in national news media just don’t have contact with.”
The New York Post added:
CNN has been a network in flux since last year, when it fired primetime star Chris Cuomo after it was learned that he helped his brother, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, craft communications strategy in the face of sexual harassment allegations.
Months after Cuomo’s dismissal, his then-boss, Zucker, resigned after it was learned that he was carrying on a consensual relationship with his subordinate, chief marketing officer Allison Gollust.
One of Zucker’s pet projects, the streaming service CNN+, was shuttered less than a month after its launch — one of the key cost-cutting decisions made by the network’s new parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.
Zucker’s successor, Chris Licht, has made several high-profile changes in an effort to boost ratings and change the perception that the network is a tool of the left.
Wallace was initially part of CNN+, but after the streaming network went belly-up, he was handed a Sunday slot on CNN, though his ratings are still poor.
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