Fox News Sticks With Debate Trio

Fox News' debate A-team—Megyn Kelly, Bret Baier and Chris Wallace—will repeat as moderators for the March 3 Republican debate from Detroit.

It will be the third Fox News-hosted debate. The previous two set ratings records for the news network, the Aug. 6 debate holding the record at 24 million viewers. Last week's Donald Trump-less debate was still the second-most viewed program in the network's history.

Fox says it will announce criteria for who will be on the debate stage closer to the event. That could leave time for other candidates to drop out, as they have been doing in recent days—Rick Santorum, Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee.

Trump's political director Michael Glassner had not returned a request for comment at press time about whether he would participate in the March 3 debate. While part of the reason for his tiff with Fox was that Megyn Kelly was moderating, he later said it was more about a snarky statement from Fox in defense of Kelly.

Trump has since said Fox apologized and signaled the fence was at least temporarily mended.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.