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    Megyn Kelly Returning to Debate Spotlight on NewsNation

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    Wednesday’s Trump-less debate is a breakthrough moment for a fledgling cable network — and a comeback of sorts for Ms. Kelly, a former Fox News star.Eight years ago, Megyn Kelly’s turn as a debate moderator made headlines around the world. Before an audience of 24 million Fox News viewers, she confronted Donald J. Trump about his history of misogynist remarks, setting off a well-publicized feud that helped her leap from cable news to NBC.This week, Ms. Kelly returns to television as a moderator of Wednesday’s Republican debate. A breakout moment may be harder to come by.For one thing, Mr. Trump is almost certainly not going to appear, despite Ms. Kelly’s warm entreaties. (“Mr. President,” she wrote on X, “you would be more than welcome and we would love to have you.”) And her appearance will be seen by a fraction of her old audience: The debate will air on NewsNation, an upstart cable network unfamiliar to many Americans.It is still a milestone for Ms. Kelly, whose career imploded when NBC canceled her show in 2018, after she mused on air about whether white people could wear blackface on Halloween. The ouster followed weak ratings and a series of incidents that suggested her punchy and confrontational style was a poor fit for the serene pastures of morning TV.Ms. Kelly, 53, gradually re-emerged as a conservative podcaster and radio host, stoking the culture war grievances that were her stock-in-trade at Fox. (Her recent posts on X refer to “mask fascists” and denounce the use of the term “pregnant person.”) She signed a deal with SiriusXM in 2021 and has since broken into Top 10 charts for news podcasts and booked big guests — including, in September, Mr. Trump.During that interview, Mr. Trump scolded Ms. Kelly for their famous debate moment, saying, “That was a bad question.” Ms. Kelly gamely replied: “That was a great question!” A few days later, at a rally in Iowa, Mr. Trump called her “nasty.”Ms. Kelly declined to speak for this article. In an interview with Real ClearPolitics, she admitted that she had doubted if Wednesday’s debate, with its undercard lineup, was even worth her time. “Does it matter at all?” she said she asked herself.Ultimately, she said, she decided to participate, suggesting that one of the candidates onstage — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Chris Christie, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy — could, in the event of a Trump criminal conviction or perhaps a health scare, end up as the nominee. “It’s not likely, but who am I to rule it out?” she said.Her attitude is something of a contrast to the unvarnished enthusiasm of anchors and executives at NewsNation, who consider Wednesday’s event, in Tuscaloosa, Ala., a breakthrough moment. NewsNation, which is owned by the Nexstar Media Group and airs 24-hour news coverage on weekdays, outflanked better-known outlets like ABC and Newsmax to secure the broadcast rights for this week’s debate.Elizabeth Vargas, a NewsNation anchor and former ABC News personality.John Lamparski/Getty ImagesEliana Johnson, editor in chief of The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site.Taylor Glascock for The New York Times“We’re a brand-new news network, and it’s a fantastic opportunity for us,” said Elizabeth Vargas, a NewsNation anchor and former ABC News personality. Ms. Vargas will serve as a moderator with Ms. Kelly and Eliana Johnson, editor in chief of The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site.NewsNation, which started in 2021, has fashioned itself as an independent alternative to more partisan, opinion-fueled channels. “The moderate middle may be quieter or may not make as much of a fuss, but they’re a powerful voting bloc,” Ms. Vargas said. “Those are the viewers we serve.” The network has hired prominent journalists like Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield and Chris Cuomo, the former CNN anchor who was fired over ethics concerns and who now hosts NewsNation’s 8 p.m. hour.Ratings remain low. Year-to-date, NewsNation’s prime-time audience has averaged 109,000 viewers on weeknights, compared with 2.2 million for Fox News, 650,000 for CNN and 264,000 for Newsmax, according to Nielsen. The network says that it has a growing fan base — that prime-time figure is up 73 percent from a year before — and that Wednesday’s showcase can reel in new viewers. The debate, which begins at 8 p.m., will also be shown online and on local affiliates of the CW, a broadcast network owned by Nexstar.The stage for the December 2023 Republican presidential candidates debate, which will be shown on Wednesday on NewsNation.via NewsNationMs. Kelly is not the only Fox News veteran with a major role in the NewsNation debate.Cherie Grzech, who produced 15 primary debates for Fox News before leaving in 2021, now runs NewsNation’s news and political programming. Chris Stirewalt, best-known as the Fox News analyst who defended the 2020 election night call for Arizona — a projection that enraged Mr. Trump, alienated viewers and led to Mr. Stirewalt losing his job — is NewsNation’s political editor.Mr. Stirewalt said he believed in the mission of his new employer. “The shortest distance to securing a habituated audience is to cosset them and flatter them and to reinforce their prejudices,” he said. “The harder thing is to try to be aspirationally fair, and try to report and analyze honestly, not to reinforce existing opinions. It’s a substantially underserved market.”This may be a counterintuitive business model, given the nation’s polarized state, but NewsNation is not alone in trying it out. Jeff Zucker, the former president of CNN, is aiming to acquire The Daily Telegraph, a London newspaper, in hopes of expanding its reach to center-right consumers in the United States.Similar experiments have struggled. Shepard Smith, another anchor who left Fox News, created a straightforward newscast on the financial network CNBC in 2020; it was canceled after two years. Chris Licht, who succeeded Mr. Zucker at CNN, promised to dial back partisan opinion, but his programming efforts failed to jell and ratings plummeted.Ms. Kelly, who has no qualms about expressing strong views, is more opinionated than her temporary partners at NewsNation. Eric Bolling, a former Fox News colleague who is now an anchor on Newsmax, said that would work to her advantage.“She will be the biggest viewer draw of all Wednesday night,” Mr. Bolling wrote in a text message. “Unless Trump shows up!” More

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      Haley and DeSantis Face Off: What to Watch for in the GOP Debate

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      Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Christie will also be onstage, but much of the attention will be on the two Republicans best positioned to become the top challenger to Donald Trump.The debate stage in Tuscaloosa, Ala., will be down to four Republican presidential hopefuls on Wednesday — with the front-runner, Donald J. Trump, still absent — as the imperative to break from the dwindling pack grows more intense less than six weeks before the Iowa caucuses.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, are in a slugfest to claim the mantle of Mr. Trump’s main alternative, and all that would come with that: campaign donations, late endorsements and the possible votes of independents and even Democrats alarmed by Mr. Trump’s authoritarian language and plans to enact a more radical agenda.But the two other candidates onstage, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, will do all they can to grab the spotlight in the hope of revitalizing their flagging campaigns.Here’s what to watch:Who will stand out on a less crowded stage?After the withdrawal from the presidential race of Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, there will be only four candidates on the debate stage on Wednesday night. Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThe “will he or won’t he” speculation about whether Mr. Trump would participate in the previous debates in Wisconsin, California and Florida is gone ahead of the gathering in Alabama. The former president’s decision to sit out the events has not hurt his standing in the polls, and the question for many now is whether he would show up to a debate in the general election next fall.But as the field narrows by attrition, the final four will have more time to make an impression on Republican primary voters who have yet to decide.Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota on Monday became the latest candidate to drop from the race, although he had failed to make the stage for the last debate. The withdrawal of Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina will be felt more acutely, since he probably would have qualified for Wednesday’s event. His debate performances were largely unremarkable but he made a small splash in Miami last month when he showed up with his girlfriend.The most memorable lines of the last two debates involved Ms. Haley skewering Mr. Ramaswamy. In September, she told her younger rival, “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber,” and last month she called him “just scum.”Those lines raise an important question for Mr. DeSantis as he tries to fend off Ms. Haley’s rise in the polls: Can he take her on more directly and win?Mr. Ramaswamy appears likely to continue his strategy of denigrating and baiting all of his opponents except for Mr. Trump, though the efficacy of his insult-driven blitzkrieg seems to have diminished since he shocked the field in Milwaukee in August. In Iowa City on Saturday, he said he had been “brutally frank in the last debate,” adding, “I don’t intend to stop doing that now.”Mr. Christie faces a loftier question: Is his stated goal of thwarting another Trump presidency better served by dropping out and letting a rival consolidate the anti-Trump vote?Can Haley keep her winning streak alive?The former South Carolina governor has parlayed her debate performances into a real sense of momentum. Yes, she remains far behind Mr. Trump, the man who made her his first United Nations ambassador, in national polling, but her trajectory is on a slow, steady climb, unlike those of her onstage rivals.Wednesday’s debate is the first since the political network founded by the billionaire conservatives Charles and David Koch endorsed Ms. Haley, promising to mobilize an army of grass-roots door knockers behind her. It is also the first since Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, began encouraging other major donors and Democrats to back her as the last hope of thwarting Mr. Trump’s nomination.She needs to reassure those new backers that they made a solid bet. To do that, she will have to find the zingers she used to dismantle Mr. Ramaswamy, and turn them on the candidate now in her sights, Mr. DeSantis.She still needs to figure out, however, whether she is the candidate for those inside her party and out who fear and loathe Mr. Trump, or whether she wants to appeal to Trump supporters as a fresh face to pick up his mantle. If she is the former, she may only get so far in a G.O.P. that still broadly approves of the former president. Appealing to Trump likers and loathers has been the trick that no Republican has solved.Can DeSantis wrest the mic from Ramaswamy?Mr. DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, though well-funded, have slipped in the polls.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesAfter taking glancing shots at Mr. Trump for months, Mr. DeSantis laid into him at length on Tuesday.He castigated Mr. Trump for bragging about the endorsement of a Black Lives Matter activist, for criticizing Mr. DeSantis’s strongly anti-abortion record, and for somehow blaming the Florida governor for the College Football Playoff selection committee’s snub of Florida State University, which was not selected to vie for the championship despite an undefeated season. (The University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, was the beneficiary of that snub, so watch for college football talk on Wednesday night.)But Mr. DeSantis’s main criticism was of Mr. Trump’s refusal to debate: “I don’t think he can stand there for two hours against me and come out on top,” he said. “I think they know that, and I think that’s why they’re not doing it.”Clashing with Mr. Trump is vital; after all, you can’t win the nomination without beating the front-runner. But Mr. DeSantis has to blunt Ms. Haley’s rise as well.In Tuscaloosa, Mr. DeSantis needs to take the microphone away from Mr. Ramaswamy, who has faded to fourth place in national polling averages. Ms. Haley, by contrast, is now solidly in second place in New Hampshire, neck and neck with Mr. DeSantis in Iowa and threatening him nationally.Mr. DeSantis’s pressing task is to reassert his status as the Trump alternative, and for him to do that, the debate cannot devolve again into a cage match between Ms. Haley and Mr. Ramaswamy.What is Chris Christie’s endgame?Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, barely qualified for Wednesday’s debate.John Tully for The New York TimesFor reasons of ego, unrelenting self-confidence or designs on his future, Mr. Ramaswamy, a political neophyte with nary an elected office to his name, is probably not leaving the primary race anytime soon. The money he is spending from his own bank accounts — $17 million as of Sept. 30 — can keep his campaign afloat as long as he wishes.Mr. Christie is, in many respects, Mr. Ramaswamy’s opposite, a career public servant without a vast fortune to tap, whose campaign’s raison d’être is to diminish Mr. Trump’s stature, not to lionize him as the 21st century’s greatest president. But the former New Jersey governor finds himself at a crossroads in Tuscaloosa.He barely made the debate stage, just qualifying under the Republican National Committee’s tightening requirements — polling at 6 percent or higher in national or early-state polling, and garnering 80,000 unique donors.And his third-place status in New Hampshire, with around 12 percent of the vote, could be seen either as a strength or as a spoiler for the aspirations of the candidate in second place, Ms. Haley, who needs a strong showing in the Granite State to slingshot her into the primary contest in her home state, South Carolina.Mr. Christie continues to denounce Mr. Trump’s fitness for office in ways his Republican rivals won’t, challenging the former president as a would-be dictator threatening to end democracy as we know it. But that line of attack has proved ineffective among Republican primary voters.Megyn Kelly is back. How will she handle the absent Trump?Megyn Kelly, right, preparing for a Republican presidential debate in Detroit during the 2016 campaign. Donald J. Trump attacked her during that cycle’s debates. Richard Perry/The New York TimesThe 2016 presidential campaign might seem like ancient history, but for many Americans, Mr. Trump’s treatment of Megyn Kelly, then a Fox News anchor, during the debates secured his reputation as a misogynist.After Ms. Kelly questioned him forcefully in one debate, he came back with, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” Ms. Kelly was defiant in the face of angry Trump supporters, declaring that she would “not apologize for doing good journalism.”Wednesday’s debate, which will be carried by a cable news newcomer, NewsNation, will have a considerably smaller audience than those Fox showdowns in 2015 and no Mr. Trump — but Ms. Kelly, who now hosts “The Megyn Kelly Show” on Sirius XM, will be back.No doubt, she will be tough on the four participants. The question is, how hard will she press them to take on Mr. Trump?Ms. Kelly will be sharing the moderators’ desk with Elizabeth Vargas of NewsNation and Eliana Johnson of the Washington Free Beacon, an all-female panel tilted to the right. The debate will be televised on the CW starting at 8 p.m. Eastern time, and streamed on the NewsNation website and the conservative social media site Rumble.Anjali Huynh More

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      Megyn Kelly Will Moderate the Next G.O.P. Debate, on NewsNation

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      The event, on Dec. 6, is an opportunity for an upstart cable news network to expand its relatively small viewership.Megyn Kelly, whose high-flying career as a Fox News anchor fell to earth after an ill-advised move to NBC — and then remade herself as a conservative podcaster and radio host — is set to return to the political spotlight next month as a moderator for the next Republican primary debate.The event, set for Dec. 6 in Tuscaloosa, Ala., is the fourth meeting of the party’s presidential candidates. Former President Donald J. Trump, who famously clashed (and later made up) with Ms. Kelly during the 2016 election, is unlikely to attend.The debate will be hosted by the upstart television network NewsNation, a 24-hour cable news station that Nexstar Media Group owns. Its selection by the Republican Party is a breakthrough moment of sorts for a channel that is still unfamiliar to many viewers. The channel has aggressively hired veteran anchors and producers in recent years, but its audience remains small compared with rivals like Fox News or MSNBC.Ms. Kelly will be joined at the moderators’ desk by Elizabeth Vargas, a NewsNation anchor, and Eliana Johnson, editor in chief of The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site. The Free Beacon and SiriusXM, which airs Ms. Kelly’s radio show, are sponsors of the debate. The event will also be shown on digital platforms and local affiliates of the CW, the broadcast network that Nexstar owns.NewsNation, which presents itself as a centrist, independent news service, has been dogged in the past by accusations of conservative bias, staff resignations and reports of dysfunction. Recently, it has added a number of familiar on-air personalities, including Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield and Ms. Vargas, who was previously an anchor of “World News Tonight” and “20/20” on ABC. Chris Cuomo, who was fired by CNN in 2021 amid ethics concerns, is the channel’s 8 p.m. host.NewsNation is an upstart television network.Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service, via Getty ImagesThe network has also hired numerous former employees of Fox News. They include Chris Stirewalt, the former Fox News politics editor who was fired because of his role in the network’s election night call in Arizona that enraged Mr. Trump, and Leland Vittert, a former correspondent who left the network after his critical reporting on Mr. Trump angered Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox News’s parent company. Cherie Grzech, who led Fox News’s politics and campaign coverage for many years, is also now at the network.Political parties typically team up with a major broadcast or cable channel to host their primary debates, with an eye toward achieving the largest possible audience. Last month, NewsNation averaged 118,000 viewers in prime time on weeknights, up 23 percent from a year earlier. Sean Compton, the Nexstar executive who oversees NewsNation, said on Thursday that the debate would be “an opportunity to introduce more Americans” to the channel’s “outstanding journalism.”Other participants suggested that viewers could expect a different tone. Ms. Johnson, of The Free Beacon, said the debate would occur “outside of the mainstream media echo chamber” and provide Republicans with “a debate where conservative ideas and values will be the terrain and not the target.”Ms. Kelly promised an entertaining night. “It will be the margarita of debates,” she said in a statement. “Spicy, fun and somewhat intoxicating. Looking forward to it.” More

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      Who Are Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the Debate Moderators?

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      The role of debate moderator carries prestige, but it also brings exacting demands and inherent risks: personal attacks by candidates, grievances about perceived biases and, for the two moderators of Wednesday’s Republican primary debate, a tempestuous cable news network’s reputation.Enter Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the Fox News Channel mainstays who drew that assignment and will pose questions to the eight G.O.P. presidential candidates squaring off for the first time, absent former President Donald J. Trump.The party’s front-runner, Mr. Trump will bypass the debate in favor of an online interview with Tucker Carlson, who was fired from Fox News in April.But that doesn’t mean the debate’s moderators will be under any less of a microscope.Here’s a closer look at who they are:Bret BaierHe is the chief political anchor for Fox News and the host of “Special Report With Bret Baier” at 6 p.m. on weeknights. Mr. Baier, 53, joined the network in 1998, two years after the network debuted, according to his biography.Mr. Baier, like Ms. MacCallum, is no stranger to the debate spotlight.In 2016, he moderated three G.O.P. primary debates for Fox, alongside Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace, who have since left the network. He was present when Ms. Kelly grilled Mr. Trump about his treatment of women during a 2015 debate, an exchange that drew Mr. Trump’s ire and led him to boycott the network’s next debate nearly six months later.During the 2012 presidential race, Mr. Baier moderated five Republican primary debates.At a network dominated by conservative commentators like Sean Hannity and the departed Mr. Carlson and Bill O’Reilly, Mr. Baier has generally avoided controversy — but not entirely.After Fox News called Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr. on election night in 2020, becoming the first major news network to do so and enraging Mr. Trump and his supporters, Mr. Baier suggested in an email to network executives the next morning that the outlet should reverse its projection.“It’s hurting us,” he wrote in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times.Mr. Baier was also part of a witness list in the defamation lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems brought against Fox News over the network’s role in spreading disinformation about the company’s voting equipment. Fox settled the case for $787.5 million before it went to trial.Martha MacCallumShe is the anchor and executive editor of “The Story With Martha MacCallum” at 3 p.m. on weekdays. Ms. MacCallum, 59, joined the network in 2004, according to her biography.During the 2016 election, Ms. MacCallum moderated a Fox News forum for the bottom seven Republican presidential contenders who had not qualified for the party’s first debate in August 2015. She reprised that role in January 2016, just days before the Iowa caucuses.She and Mr. Baier also moderated a series of town halls with individual Democratic candidates during the 2020 election, including one that featured Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.Before joining Fox, she worked for NBC and CNBC.When Fox projected Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump in Arizona, effectively indicating that Mr. Biden had clinched the presidency, Ms. MacCallum was similarly drawn into the maelstrom at the network.During a Zoom meeting with network executives and Mr. Baier, she suggested it was not enough to call states based on numerical calculations — the standard by which networks have made such determinations for generations — but that viewers’ reactions should be considered.“In a Trump environment,” Ms. MacCallum said, according to a review of the phone call by The Times, “the game is just very, very different.” More