Should Megyn Kelly be fired?

Having spent three years working in Washington I got to admire Megyn Kelly appearing every day on Fox News. She was always a very confident and assured interviewer, strong voice and looked great. With all those combined assets there were always people who were jealous of her. I just thought she was a good professional journalist and I liked her style. Her tough questions to Donald Trump before he became president were ruthless but necessary and as a consequence she received some pretty outrageous and disgusting putdowns by Trump. One particular comment by him was so mysogynistic that every woman - and decent man - on the planet would have been revolted. Now she is in trouble. She made some remarks on her NBC morning show which have caused outrage and she is about to be sacked it seems. I don't know her personally but I admire her as a television presenter and I seriously doubt that she meant her remarks to be racist. What she said was that when she was a kid people used to blacken their faces for Halloween and she didn't see anything wrong with it. She said that now white people who blackened their faces and black people who whitened their faces as part of a costume for Halloween were criticised but she questioned whether it was racist. She said one more thing, that a reality TV show star had blackened her face and put on an afro wig to look like Diana Ross of the Supremes. She didn't see anything wrong with that provided it was meant as a mark of respect for the superstar singer. Megyn Kelly got slammed for these "racist" remarks and was forced to make an on-air apology. Now she looks like losing her job and perhaps her career as a television presenter. Racism or perceived racism is a major major issue today, and rightly so. But I believe Kelly was merely alluding to what it was like when she was a kid when such things as dressing up as a black person was not seen as a racist act. When I was a child we had the Black and White Minstrel show on television where white singers had their faces painted black. It was hugely popular and it never entered my head that it was racist. I don't remember my parents ever saying: "This is disgraceful it shouldn't be allowed, it's an insult to black people." Nowadays, everything has changed. A show like that could never be broadcast. Greater awareness of the sensitivities of different races and different coloured skins and different religions is one of society's most significant developments. I hope that Megyn Kelly would agree but her remarks gave the impression that she didn't care. All she needed to have done in her show was to say something like this: "Of course that's my memory of when I was a kid but obviously today you have to appreciate that society has changed and this is why blackening faces is no longer acceptable." She didn't say that because I assume she wanted to provoke some responses from the audience by being a little controversial. It was a fatal misjudgment. But should her career be ruined? No.