'She’s Gifted. She Has All the Parts'

Indeed, Megyn Kelly does have all the parts. Beautiful, intelligent and she doesn't suffer fools liberals easily. Surprisingly, the New York Times offers up a very fair portrait of her today, giving us an excuse to post her photo. The writer takes a typical cheap swipe at Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, but we assume that's part of the style manual at the Old Grey Hag.

First “America’s Newsroom.” Then “America’s Election Headquarters.” And on Monday, Megyn Kelly will begin anchoring a third all-about-America newscast, “America Live.”

“We’re big on America here at Fox,” Ms. Kelly said in an interview last week.

And America, or at least a big chunk of it, is big on Fox News, which is coming off its highest-rated year ever. That record is largely attributable to right-wing opinion-mongers like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, whose bluster sometimes distracts from the newscasts that make up Fox’s daytime schedule.

But there is no concealing the rise of Ms. Kelly, a 39-year-old lawyer who is becoming a solo anchor for the first time. She seems to be progressing through Fox’s star-making machinery, which has turned news anchors like Shepard Smith into household names.

Ms. Kelly appears weekly on Mr. O’Reilly’s opinion program, often putting her legal background to use. Inside the News Corporation, the owner of Fox, Ms. Kelly has been mentioned as a leading candidate for a prime-time anchor job. Fox’s contract with Greta Van Susteren, the longtime 10 p.m. anchor, is up at the end of the year.

In her new role, Ms. Kelly will lead the 1 and 2 p.m. Eastern hours, reading the day’s news and continuing her trademark “Kelly’s Court” segment, which comes from “America’s Newsroom,” the morning show on which she was paired with Bill Hemmer for the last three years. The afternoon shift, typically busy with breaking news, accentuates what Ms. Kelly calls the “sort of ‘swim, swim!’ nature of live TV.”

“It’s heady,” she said.

Fox executives, who view Mr. Hemmer and Ms. Kelly as rising stars, say they split up the pair to spread their talents across more hours of the day. “She’s gifted. She has all the parts,” Michael Clemente, the senior vice president for news editorial at Fox, said of Ms. Kelly.