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NBC Cancels Megyn Kelly’s Morning Show Following Blackface Controversy


Megyn Kelly Today has been canceled by NBC following comments she made about wearing blackface on Halloween in a Tuesday taping. An NBC spokesperson said in a statement to Glamour, “Megyn Kelly Today is not returning. Next week, the 9:00 A.M. hour will be hosted by other Today coanchors.” Though Kelly made an on-air apology, rumors have been swirling about the future of the show for days and she did not appear live on Thursday or Friday morning after NBC confirmed to People that it would air taped episodes for the remainder of the week. “They’re contacting the staff and reassigning everyone today. Everyone’s being told that they still have a home here, but it won’t be on Megyn’s show,” one source told People.

The Tuesday incident had some believing that Kelly was defending blackface, asking “What is racist?” She added: “You do get in trouble if you’re a white person who puts on blackface for Halloween or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween. Back when I was a kid that was OK as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.”

“I can’t keep up with the number of people we’re offending just by being normal people,” Kelly continued.

The backlash was swift. Kelly’s Today colleagues condemned her behavior on the air. “She owes a bigger apology to folks of color,” Al Roker said. And Craig Melvin called her statement “ignorant and racist.”

Kelly was a contentious hire for NBC from the start, given her background at Fox News, where she had a reputation for inflammatory statements like declaring that Santa Claus and Jesus could only be white. And the controversies didn’t stop once she took over the nine o’clock hour of Today. There was an awkward interview with Jane Fonda during which Kelly kept pressing the actress to speak about her plastic surgery. Then there was the time she joked with Suzanne Somers about sex while asleep. Or when she spoke out against gun control after the Las Vegas shooting.

The show has also struggled in the ratings, which is a problem for the network when Kelly is signed to a contract that is reportedly worth $23 million a year. Sources say that Kelly is still negotiating her exit package from NBC which could amount to tens of millions of dollars.

Reactions on social media were mixed, with some praising the choice to cancel the show and others finding it unfair.

Kelly has yet to comment on the cancellation.





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Megyn Kelly Speaks Out Against Gun Control After Las Vegas Shooting


Megyn Kelly Today was preempted for NBC’s coverage of the shooting that killed at least 59 people and injured at least 527 in Las Vegas the night before. But on Tuesday, Kelly went on air to address the attack. First, she expressed how upset she was to hear about the news. But then, she pivoted to some controversial statements about gun control.

“Now we inevitably struggle, in vain, to make sense of it all, trying to rationalize an irrational act,” she said. “I think we feel like finding the motive will help us understand better, help us feel like the next one may be preventable, if we can only understand this one. But the truth is, we never really change anything after these situations, do we? And the mass murders keep coming. They keep coming and they come and they come, over and over again. So many now that we stop and say ‘oh, god,’ when we see it, then we move on, perhaps a little too quickly.”

She continued, “I do feel helpless in these times. Do you? The mental health laws are not going to change, and we know it. The gun laws? Right. And even if they did change, you would still get people like this guy and we know it. From the look of things, this is a guy who was a lone shooter, no history of violence, no record, no red flags, no anything. No anything in this case, not yet anyway. A retired accountant who had a girlfriend, who was supposedly happy, decided to murder a group of innocent people here in the land of the free. So how exactly do we make sense of that?”

Her guest, journalist Tom Brokaw, expressed a different opinion. “We are where we are because of the power of people who wanted these kinds of guns, and the NRA managed to organize them and get them as a political force in America,” he said. “We’re a long way away from that second amendment in which we said that a well regulated militia is important to our country.”

Kelly cut him off “Got it. Gotta leave it at that, Tom. Thank you to our entire panel. We’re up against a hard break, apologies Tom Brokaw,” she said. “Sorry, they’re wrapping me hard because we got a hard break coming up. But listen, this debate will not end now. There are people who defend the second amendment who believe you can’t legislate against evil, and those who believe we have to have an honest conversation. Gotta leave it at that.”

Despite Kelly’s claim that this still would’ve happened with stricter gun control laws in place, research shows that these laws do affect people’s safety. There’s a correlation between state gun control laws and the number of gun deaths in each state, and the U.S. has a huge number of gun deaths compared to other countries. UN data show that the U.S. has over 21 times the firearm deaths of Australia, which has seen a dramatic decline in gun-related deaths ever since passing stronger gun control legislation in the 90s. And women in the U.S. are 11 times more likely to die at the hands of guns than those in other high-income countries, according to a study in the Journal of Trauma.

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People on Twitter have called Kelly out for mourning the lost lives in Vegas while also defending something that contributed to them—and then interrupting somebody trying to call attention to the problem.



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