Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Megyn Kelly’s Unfavorables Doubled


Megyn Kelly's August ratings just in: Did she slay Trump? Fox News anchor's feud with the Donald a fresh factor, by Joe Kovacs, 9/1/15, WND 
When it comes to the battle between presidential candidate Donald Trump and Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who is winning? It depends on what you use as your criteria for victory.
If television ratings are your sole factor, it appears Kelly is performing extremely well, logging the highest-rated cable-news show for the month of August, even with her vacation after the first Republican debate.
“Buoyed by the record-breaking showcase of Fox News Channel’s GOP debate and her 11 p.m. telecast that night, she outpaced typical victor Bill O’Reilly for only the third full month since she shifted to her high-profile primetime slot in late 2013,” noted the Hollywood Reporter.
“The 9 p.m. show averaged 566,000 adults 25-54, a 41 percent jump and safely above O’Reilly’s 541,000 in the news demographic. With the debate, their respective showings and Sean Hannity’s – the host welcomed one of the month’s higher-profile visits from Trump –FNC primetime was up a whopping 64 percent in the demo from August 2014. All told, it was the net’s highest-rated month since November 2012.”
Despite Kelly’s dominance in the television ratings, a brand-new poll Tuesday shows Republicans apparently livid with the Fox News star. “Trump is winning his fight with Megyn Kelly,” says Public Policy Polling, which conducted the survey.
When the group last polled her in December of 2013, her favorability with Republicans nationally was 44 percent, with an unfavorability rating of 9 percent.
While her favorability remains in the same neighborhood at 42 percent, her unfavorability has more than doubled to 20 percent, “largely because she’s at 20/43 with Trump’s supporters,” says the pollster.
“Meanwhile, Trump’s popularity with GOP voters has just continued to grow,” said PPP. “Last month before the debate his favorability with them was 48/39, now it’s improved to 56/30. Fox News as a whole isn’t suffering for the feud though: in February we found 66 percent of Republicans said they trusted the network, and now we find 66 percent say they have a favorable opinion of it.”
In the immediate aftermath of the first debate which aired on the Fox News Channel, Trump retweeted a message that Kelly was a “bimbo.”
He also complained about the questions asked of him during the event.
“The questions to me were far tougher, and that I – supposedly, according to what everyone’s telling me, I won the debate, according to the call-ins and everything,” Trump told reporters after the debate. “But the questions to me were not nice, I didn’t think they were appropriate, and I think Megyn behaved very badly personally.”
Kelly then went on vacation for 10 days, and when she returned, Trump reignited the feud.
In a series of late-night tweets, the Hill reported, Trump accused Kelly of being “off her game,” and suggested she “must have had a terrible vacation” because she was “afraid to confront” her guest, Cornel West, on the subject of immigration.
 
Comments
 
The Fox Debate questions were irrelevant.  I thought I was watching the MSNBC Debate.  They herded all the candidates into social issue questions ad nauseam.  Megyn Kelly’s question was a sexist low-ball, aimed at gender division. It was a “when did you stop beating your wife ?” type questions. Trump probably did call Rosie O’Donnell a fat pig, because she was a Liberal Harpy.
 
I would rather have heard the candidates questioned about UN Agenda 21 implementation in the US and Muslim immigration.  At least Fox could have pummeled the candidates with questions about cutting federal spending and the economy and the failure of the Republican Congress to reverse unpopular Obama policies.
 
Fox lost more than Megyn Kelly. Fox needed to advance the debate to deal with more substantial issues and they failed.
 
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
 

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