Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly And Megyn Kelly Join MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow In Great Ratings Week

This past week’s ratings for Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly, and Rachel Maddow certainly aren’t the best for any of them, but they’re still good, especially considering they are coming off of a vacation week. When averaging ratings for shows after the Memorial Day holiday on Showbuzz Daily, O’Reilly scored an average 3.12 million viewers, Megyn Kelly averaged 2.89 million a night, and new superstar Rachel Maddow averaged almost 2 million.

Bill O’Reilly’s biggest night was Tuesday when he scored 3.26 million viewers. It was his return after a short vacation and he began his 20th season with a bang. His “Talking Points Memo” segment talked about Donald Trump and immigration.

“By going to Mexico last week, Mr. Trump signaled that he is willing to engage in diplomacy. But as soon as he got back to the USA, he repeated his policy of being tough on illegal aliens. There was some nuance, but not much,” O’Reilly said before noting that Trump is gambling on the notion that people will vote for him since they are sick and tired of illegal immigration.

“Trump is hoping that voters are fed up with a federal government that won’t enforce immigration law and allows chaos to reign. The GOP ticket apparently believes there are many voters who are silently sick of permissive, long standing immigration policies.”

O’Reilly added that if somebody is outspoken about enforcing immigration laws, the left will brand you a nativist and, perhaps, a racist. However, Mr. O’Reilly believes that the issue of illegal immigration has allowed Trump to win the GOP nomination.

Megyn Kelly, whose biggest night was Wednesday (3.32 million viewers), dealt with Matt Lauer’s controversial interview with Hillary Clinton.

According to transcripts from the Fox News show, Kelly played a video of some of the tougher parts of the interview.

“You’ve said it’s a mistake. Why wasn’t it more than a mistake? Why wasn’t it disqualifying if you want to be commander-in-chief?” Lauer asked Clinton in regards to her emails.

Hillary said that she has claimed repeatedly that it was a mistake to have a personal account. She said that nothing she handled on her personal email server had a header that said an email was top secret, confidential, etc.

After Lauer pointed out that Director Comey said that there was evidence to support Clinton had emails that definitely weren’t “personal,” Clinton responded that she could point to hundreds of experienced foreign policy experts who were communicating information on an unclassified system because it was necessary to answer questions.

According to the New York Times, Lauer faced a storm of criticism for his questions. Lauer was accused of sexism, unfairness, and sloppiness in his handling of the event. However, according to the Los Angeles Times, NBC News chief Andy Lack praised Matt Lauer’s presidential forum performance.

“Because of our event, national security has dominated the news cycle for days. Every major paper and news broadcast around the world has led with headlines about Putin, Iraq, ISIS, and intelligence briefings. Matt did a tremendous job – driving one of the most serious discussions to date on these topics.”

MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow, whose ratings are improving each month, scored her biggest night this week (Wednesday) with 2.67 million viewers. She wasn’t happy about Matt Lauer’s questioning either and spent a lot of this week defending Hillary from sexist critics.

The next week on Fox News and MSNBC should be interesting, especially since it was just announced that Hillary is sick with pneumonia. Political news watchers are interested in seeing how different the coverage of Hillary’s sickness is when comparing Fox News to MSNBC.

[Photo by D. Dipasupil/Getty Images]