"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.
In the past year, Fox has seemingly focused more attention on what it says is a sharp division between its daytime newscasts and its opinionated hosts in the evening. "As more and more people point to the prime-time lineup and have opinions about our opinion makers, it's a natural response to remind folks that there's another — if I do say so, very successful — aspect of Fox, and that's the daytime lineup," Ms. Kelly said.
"America's Newsroom" averaged 1.43 million viewers last year, up almost 20 percent over the previous year. Of those, about 350,000 were ages 25 to 54, the prime advertising demographic for cable news. Fox's smaller rivals, CNN and MSNBC, averaged a fraction as many viewers.
Ms. Kelly considered broadcast journalism in college — a career assessment test in high school had flagged the field for her — but gravitated instead to the law and worked for almost a decade as a litigator, most of the time for the prominent firm Jones Day.
Exhausted by "the cumulative grind," she decided on an early-30s career change. Friends with TV jobs in Chicago helped her prepare a résumé tape, and in mid-2003, she said, she "stormed" the office of Bill Lord, who is now the station manager at WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington.
"She just showed up at the doorstep," Mr. Lord recalled. "She was whip-smart, good-looking and just brimming with self-confidence. She basically sat down and told me, 'I can do this,' and there was very little doubt in my mind that she was right."
Ms. Kelly, who briefly worked as Megyn Kendall, using the name of her first husband, began reporting once a week for barely any pay — "eating off my law job" as she put it. Soon WJLA wanted her full time.
The next spring she sent a tape to Fox News on the advice of Bill Sammon, who was the White House correspondent for The Washington Times (and is now the Washington managing editor for Fox). Hired as a capital reporter at Fox, she began with assignments like Supreme Court confirmation hearings and the Duke rape case.
In early 2007, she moved to New York to co-anchor "America's Newsroom," and in the presidential election year that followed, she added an hour of election coverage.
When she was invited to substitute as an anchor for the first time, she recalls that the Fox News chief Roger Ailes, known as a talent spotter, said to her, "The only way you can disappoint me is if you try to hit a home run instead of a single."Fox viewers noticed Ms. Kelly almost immediately.
Mr. Ailes repeated the advice after she was promoted to the afternoon shift. She interprets the comment to mean "just do a solid newscast."
Mr. Clemente dismissed talk of a prime-time position in Ms. Kelly's future, saying, "Let's see how these two hours go."
"Has she had a fast rise here? Absolutely. Does she deserve it? Absolutely," Mr. Clemente said. "What does it lead to? Who knows?"
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