I don't know about Kelly but a large number of females in the media get their start as beauty queens and models. For instance, Gretchen Carlson was a beauty queen and Kimberly Guilfoyle was a model.
Guilfoyle was also a prosecutor in San Francisco before she went to work on TV. There's no denying looks are beneficial (for both sexes) when it comes to scoring gigs on TV news.
After they get the gigs, however, it becomes detrimental to their careers when they do lingerie glamour photo spreads. Note how this thread got knocked off tangent just by Frank's posting those pictures. That's why.
But, when it comes to Kelly's looks, I didn't mind the photo spread nearly as much as the butt-ugly hair style she adopted after the Trump dust-up.