Megyn Kelly said she declined former CNN President Jeff Zucker’s “huge offer” to work at the network during an Friday episode of “The Megyn Kelly Show.”
Kelly compared her departure from Fox News to CNN+ host Chris Wallace, who departed the network in December to join CNN’s newly launched streaming platform, CNN+.
“I considered going to CNN,” she told radio host Buck Sexton. “CNN made me a huge offer [by] Jeff Zucker. And I said no because I knew who’s my fanbase gonna 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 so I decided to get out of the politics game and go do morning TV and try to do something that was more Oprahesque.”
“But I understood switching political ships was not going to lead to success either,” she continued. “And I can see him [Wallace] suffering from that very problem right now.”
Sexton, a former CIA officer in the Counterterrorism Center, said CNN is not “ethical” and “journalistic” as Wallace has suggested, citing their coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop and publishing Christopher Steele’s dossier suggesting that former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.
“In what world is Chris Wallace going to CNN because it’s so ethical and journalistic? I think he’s delusional,” Sexton said.
Kelly mocked CNN for it launching CNN+, which currently has under 10,000 subscribers. (RELATED: CNN+ Continues To Tank Just One Month After Launching)
“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. There’s more appetite for these anchors who no one will watch when it’s free in Primetime, and they’re gonna pay extra out of their pocket to watch them cook or talk about books or interview people who are about 200-years-old.”
The host argued that Wallace had one of the lowest ratings at Fox News and that CNN+ likely saw him as a “foil” for his views on Trump.
Wallace said working at Fox News became “unsustainable” in an exclusive interview with The New York Times in late March due to their framing of the January 6 riots and the 2020 election results. The former “Fox News Sunday” host opposed Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson’s “Patriot Purge,” a three-part documentary exploring how the Biden administration used the Capitol riots to depict conservatives as terrorists.