Megyn Kelly has never been shy about saying exactly what’s on her mind.
CNN keeps trying to convince people it’s turning a new page, but Kelly isn’t buying any of it.
And what she said about Wolf Blitzer and CNN’s on-air talent will leave the network’s brass red with rage.
Kelly Tells Paul Murray CNN Is Already Done
Kelly sat down recently with News24’s Paul Murray and did not hold back on the state of cable news, and CNN in particular.
She acknowledged that the network has grown “slightly more fair” to President Donald Trump and Republicans since Mark Thompson took over in 2023. But she made clear that didn’t matter one bit.
“It’s too late,” Kelly said flatly.
She argued that Fox News built something over three decades that its rivals simply never figured out. The formula, as Kelly sees it, goes beyond editorial choices and gets into the basic presentation of the product itself.
“Fox, for years now, has been fair to Republicans, not always to Trump, but more so these days than the others, but Fox understands you got to put some bells and whistles on this thing, you got to make the screen pop, you’ve got to keep things dynamic, and they know how to do it,” she said.
“They’ve been doing it for 30 years now and the others have never gotten it. Never.”
That’s a pretty sweeping verdict from someone who spent years inside that machine and watched the sausage get made from the inside.
The Wolf Blitzer Moment That Has Everyone Talking
But Kelly didn’t stop at strategy or editorial philosophy. She went somewhere a lot of media critics won’t go, and she went there loud.
“Just to give you one basic example, why are there so many homely people up and down the rundown of CNN to this day?” Kelly asked. “Roger Ailes would never have allowed it!”
And then came the kicker, delivered with the kind of casual frankness that makes Kelly appointment listening for a lot of conservatives who feel like nobody in media ever just says the quiet part out loud.
“I’m just gonna say, people don’t want to look at that when they’re — they can look at anything!”
Wolf Blitzer caught the brunt of it directly. “But CNN has to take itself super seriously, we’ve got a real journalist, and suddenly, you’re staring at Wolf Blitzer, ah!” Kelly said.
Blitzer has anchored at CNN for decades and is one of the most recognizable faces in cable news. None of that protected him here.
The reference to Roger Ailes carries real weight. Ailes built Fox News from scratch into the dominant force in cable news before his resignation in 2016, and one of his core operating principles was that television is a visual medium and the people on screen should hold the audience’s attention for reasons beyond what they’re saying.
Love him or hate him, Ailes understood the business in a way CNN’s leadership apparently still doesn’t, at least by Kelly’s telling.
What CNN’s Image Problem Actually Signals
Kelly also addressed the pending merger situation involving CNN. Warner Bros. is CNN’s parent company, and a potential merger with Paramount has drawn attention partly because Paramount sits under the ownership of David Ellison, whose father Larry Ellison maintains a close relationship with President Trump.
Kelly does not appear to believe that corporate reshuffling will save the network from itself.
And she has a point that goes beyond aesthetics. CNN spent the better part of a decade burning through its credibility with viewers who felt the coverage was driven by editorial hostility toward Trump rather than any actual commitment to journalism. Ratings collapsed. Trust evaporated. No amount of rebranding fixes that once a network has spent years earning that reputation.
The “homely” comment is obviously going to generate the most headlines, because it’s the most quotable thing Kelly said. But the broader argument underneath it is more interesting. Kelly is describing a network that doubled down on the wrong things for so long that the audience simply left and has no reason to return.
The Jeff Zucker years at CNN represented a deliberate editorial bet that treating the network as an opposition operation to Trump would pay off long-term. It didn’t. Viewership crumbled. And the people who stayed in the anchor chairs while all of that unfolded are still largely there.
Kelly’s point about Fox is also worth sitting with for a moment. Fox has its critics, plenty of them, and its relationship with Trump has had its own complications over the years, as Kelly herself noted. But the network figured out decades ago that television requires engagement on multiple levels simultaneously, and that lesson has never made it across the building at CNN’s headquarters.
Whether Kelly’s comment about CNN’s on-air talent was fair or unfair, crude or sharp, the underlying diagnosis has held up across multiple election cycles now. CNN tried to position itself as the antidote to partisan television and ended up producing some of the most nakedly partisan coverage of the Trump era, wrapped in the language of sober journalism.
Viewers noticed. They left. And Wolf Blitzer is still there.
The Paul Murray Live interview gave Kelly a platform to say things that most people in the media industry think privately but rarely put into words directly. That’s been her brand since leaving the mainstream networks, and it still draws an audience precisely because so little of what gets said on television these days actually sounds like what people say when the cameras are off.
CNN’s bet that Thompson can rehabilitate the brand without fundamentally changing its personnel or its editorial culture is looking shakier by the ratings period. Kelly’s verdict was blunt. But it wasn’t exactly wrong.
Source: Mediaite, “Megyn Kelly Claims ‘So Many’ CNN Hosts Are ‘Homely’: ‘People Don’t Want to Look at That!'”