Megyn Kelly has declared Stephen Colbert a “failure” after he was fired by CBS. Now she’s being roasted for calling the kettle black.
“When he moved over to CBS, he decided to be more pundit. He desperately wanted to be Keith Olbermann. And guess what? Keith Olbermann is a failure, and now so are you, Stephen Colbert,” the former Fox News star posted on X.
That message prompted Rosie O’Donnell to fire back on Instagram with the caption, “Do u own a mirror—Do u have a conscience—WTF is wrong w you?”
After all, Kelly herself made the same career moves the quote calls a “failure.”
Kelly began as a hard news anchor and reporter before jumping networks—first with a successful run as an opinionated political pundit at Fox, and then jumping back into the mainstream again for her lucrative deal at NBC. She paved the way for that deal by painting herself as an independent who stood up to Trump after the then-candidate insulted her for asking him tough questions while moderating a GOP debate.
When her racially insensitive on-air remarks and lagging ratings got her canned from NBC, she switched gears yet again, taking on the far-right persona she now employs for her YouTube show.
Thus, Kelly calling Colbert a “failure” for doing half as many pivots as she did drew her an online roasting from O’Donnell and others. One X user called Kelly’s attempts to distance herself from her career-pivots “one of the most amazing acts of memory-holing in media history.”
Chris Cuomo called out a different similarity between Kelly and Jon Stewart, another late-night host she’s enjoyed ripping since it was announced that Late Show would end in May.
“Those who thought Jon Stewart might quit last night over Colbert didn’t have it quite right,” Kelly wrote on X after Stewart’s highly anticipated first show since Colbert’s cancellation news. “Instead, he protected his millions, his vanity, his pathetic dollop of ‘power’ and… sang a mean song.”
Cuomo replied, “So how is he different from you—other than being likable to many?”
But Kelly believes herself to be extremely different from Stewart or Colbert, she explained on her Megyn Kelly Show Tuesday. “Many of us have had very public cancelations and some were absolutely f---ing brutal,” she said. “Some of us took it like professionals, then picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off, and moved on with life. Some of us were able to reinvent ourselves after we left the cable news universe and some of us weren’t.”
While some of Kelly’s supporters seem to blame NBC for her “failure” at the network and insist her pivots were different than Colbert’s, others on X called the comments a blatant “lack of self-awareness.”
