The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network
liberalism + Socialism = Terrorism
Thanks for your Support
The New York Times Are Racist Sexiest Communists
____________________________________
The New York Times Report About Megyn Kelly The Kelly File Fox News
The New York Times Are Racist Sexiest Communists
the New York Times call Megyn Kelly Red-Meat when it come to Politics
I'm sure like that Really Hurts Megyn Kelly....
Megyn Kelly gets attack all the time by the nazi gestapo social media sites
And she does address it on The Kelly File ...
I say Keep fighting The Conservatives are Winning
The Megyn Kelly Moment
On
a gray Wednesday in November, the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and four
producers gathered around a conference table on the 17th floor of the
News Corporation building in Manhattan. They were there to plan the
281st episode of “The Kelly File,” which would be shown live in a few
hours, at 9 p.m. Kelly’s executive producer, Tom Lowell, a 25-year
veteran of TV news, ticked through the program blocks, the
between-commercial bits that are the basic unit of television
programming. The A Block would contain a Fox News exclusive on the
president’s plans to halt millions of deportations. The B and C Blocks
would focus on the Obama health care adviser Jonathan Gruber’s
declaration, caught on tape, that the Affordable Care Act passed in part
because of “the stupidity of the American voter.” Slated for the D
block was Jonathan Gilliam, a former Navy SEAL.
Gilliam
had been Kelly’s idea. She saw him on Anderson Cooper’s CNN program a
few days earlier, attacking another former SEAL, Robert O’Neill, who had
been talking about his role in the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in
sometimes salty language. Cooper asked Gilliam for a reaction. Gilliam
said the boasting was a breach of military honor and had, if anything,
made O’Neill an assassination target. O’Neill, Gilliam said, should be
prosecuted and given a dishonorable discharge.
As
it happened, Fox News was broadcasting the second part of a two-part
documentary that night that cast O’Neill in a more heroic light, so
Gilliam’s attack on O’Neill could also be viewed as an attack on Fox
News, where Gilliam had been a frequent guest as well. Kelly, sensing an
opportunity, directed her team to book him again as soon as possible.
Now, sitting with one leg tucked up on her chair, she narrowed her eyes and leaned forward. “Is he feeling less critical?”
Maybe
a little, Lowell said, adding, “but just in the last hour the head of
the Navy SEALs, the senior leadership, put out a letter — “
Kelly
cut him off: “That was out last week.” She explained to the other
producers that the letter urged the SEALs to maintain their silence, a
move that appeared to put O’Neill (and, though she didn’t say it, Fox)
on the wrong side of a debate about military honor.
Kelly
did not think the show needed to delve into any such details. That was
SEAL business, she told me before the meeting. She was more upset about
what Gilliam had said. He criticized O’Neill for using profanity, which
she found ridiculous. “This is a Navy SEAL who we trained to be a killer
of bad terrorists. He’s not going to walk around using the Queen’s
English!” Worse, and possibly even dangerous, she said, was Gilliam’s
claim that O’Neill had made himself a jihadist target.
Before
moving on to discuss the E Block, Kelly turned to Lowell with her final
order for Gilliam: “Let him know that I saw what he did last week,” she
said, in a stern but somewhat self-mocking tone.
A
few hours later, Gilliam arrived on Kelly’s cavernous set, just as she
was closing out the C block. A production assistant sat him on the white
leather high-back stool at the corner of Kelly’s transparent desk.
Gilliam is bald and broad shouldered, with a thick neck and a bushy gray
goatee. He has been trained to “kill ruthlessly,” he told me later.
Kelly, in black spiky heels and a bright red dress, her blond hair now
blown out, offered him a chilly hello during a commercial break, then
returned to paging through her notes. The stool was small, and Gilliam
appeared to droop over the sides. His Megyn moment approached.
For
those unfamiliar with the phenomenon, a Megyn moment, as I have taken
to calling it, is when you, a Fox guest — maybe a regular guest or even
an official contributor — are pursuing a line of argument that seems
perfectly congruent with the Fox worldview, only to have Kelly seize on
some part of it and call it out as nonsense, maybe even turn it back on
you. You don’t always know when, how or even if the Megyn moment will
happen; Kelly’s political sensibility and choice of subjects are
generally in keeping with that of the network at large. But you always
have to be ready for it, no matter who you are. Neither Karl Rove nor
Dick Cheney have been spared their Megyn moments, nor will the growing
field of 2016 presidential aspirants, who can look forward to two years
of interrogation on “The Kelly File.” The Megyn moment has upended the
popular notion of how a Fox News star is supposed to behave, and led to
the spectacle of a Fox anchor winning praise from the very elites whose
disdain Fox has always welcomed. In the process, Kelly’s program has not
just given America’s top-rated news channel its biggest new hit in 13
years; it has demonstrated an appeal to the younger and (slightly) more
ideologically diverse demographic Fox needs as it seeks to claim even
more territory on the American journo-political landscape.
After
another commercial break, D block began, and a video showed O’Neill
describing how it felt as he made his way to bin Laden’s compound: “We
were the F.D.N.Y.; we were the N.Y.P.D.; we were the American people.”
Then, the studio camera went live, trained on Gilliam. Kelly got right
to the point.
“This
is a little dicey because you’ve been very critical of this man,” she
said, the model of stern sincerity. “But I wanted to give you the chance
to explain it. Because I think a lot of our viewers are looking at him
thinking, That man is a national hero.”
Gilliam
was prepared. He wasn’t attacking O’Neill. He was attacking the
president. “There’s a problem that starts at the top and works its way
down,” he said.
“Head of the Navy SEALs?” she asked innocently.
No,
he said. “Let’s start with the president, commander in chief. He’s
never even been in the military. We elect somebody who’s never been in
the military before, and we don’t put them through any training so they
know how the military works. Then you have a vice president who goes out
— “
But
Kelly, incredulous, stopped him midsentence. She then asked him a
question often heard on Fox News, though seldom in nonrhetorical form:
“What did the president do wrong?”
Here
was the Megyn moment, and Gilliam would never recover. He tried to
explain his case, arguing that the White House set the bad example for
O’Neill and his fellow SEALs by divulging details about the operation in
a craven bid to win credit for the president. But Kelly didn’t let it
shake her focus: his mistreatment of O’Neill. “You made people view him
as a pariah,” she said.
It
was another win, and another winning night, for Megyn Kelly. That
Wednesday, like most weeknights since her show debuted in 2013, she beat
all of her cable-news competitors. Her audience of 2.8 million was four
times as large as Rachel Maddow’s on MSNBC and six times larger as that
of “Somebody’s Gotta Do It,” the Mike Rowe program on CNN about people
who devote their lives to odd passions. In fact, “The Kelly File” was
the highest-rated nonsports program in her time slot in all of basic
cable in 2014. For Roger Ailes, the Fox News Channel chairman and chief
executive, who put her there and raised her in his television image,
Kelly has become his “breakthrough artist,” the one who will define
Fox’s future.
‘Attractive-looking blond anchorwomen are not rare,’ Brit Hume said. ‘Attractive-looking blond anchorwomen who speak with a fierce authority are rare.’
Ailes has long
argued that Americans alienated by the sensibilities of the “New
York-Hollywood elitists” are a valuable demographic, and the past two
decades have proved him right. He started Fox News in 1996, led it to
first place in the cable-news ratings in 2002 and has widened his lead
ever since. At the point it surpassed CNN, Fox News had an average
prime-time audience of 1.2 million, while CNN’s was 900,000 and MSNBC’s
was around 400,000. By the end of 2012 — a presidential-election year,
with higher-than-typical news viewership — its prime-time audience of
more than two million was the third-biggest in all of basic cable and
larger than those of MSNBC (905,000) and CNN (677,000) combined. By last
year, its share of that news pie had climbed to 61 percent, and it had
moved to second place in the prime-time rankings for all of basic cable,
behind ESPN.
This
has given Ailes consistent bragging rights, no small matter for a man
whose braggadocio is television legend. (When Paula Zahn departed Fox
News for CNN in 2001, he said he could beat her ratings with “a dead
raccoon.”) But it has also given him something more impressive:
ever-increasing profits. During a 10-year span, Fox News’s profits grew
sixfold to $1.2 billion in 2014, on total operating revenue of $2
billion, according to the financial analysis firm SNL Kagan. By
contrast, those of CNN and MSNBC have leveled off over the past few
years, with the occasional small dip or spike.
In
all, Ailes has contributed 69 consecutive quarters of growth to Rupert
Murdoch’s media empire, which split into two public companies in 2013.
Within 21st Century Fox, which encompasses the film,
broadcast-television and cable-entertainment divisions and employs
27,000 people, Fox News accounted for roughly 18 percent of the total
profits last year, even though it has less than 8 percent of the
employee base. Kagan projects that Fox News will deliver $1.9 billion in
profit by 2018. “They’re just doing phenomenally,” said Derek Baine,
the Kagan senior analyst.
And
yet, for a network that wants to grow in both viewers and dollars,
Ailes’s favored demographic has begun to pose something of a constraint.
In an online survey, the Pew Research Center has found
that 84 percent of those whom it identified as “consistently
conservative” already watched Fox News. Moreover, though Fox News
regularly wins in the demographic that matters most to advertisers —
those viewers between the ages of 25 and 54 — it has the oldest audience
in cable news, a fact that its detractors are quick to point out. How
many more of Ailes’s “average Americans” are there who are not already
tuned into Fox News on a regular basis?
The
Pew Research Center data, though, also suggests an area where expansion
is still possible: 37 percent of the Fox News audience holds views that
Pew calls ideologically “mixed.” (This means their survey responses on
specific political questions cut across ideological lines: For example,
they support same-sex marriage but oppose new restrictions on gun
ownership.) Similarly, a survey by the Public Religion Research
Institute found that about 38 percent of all Americans identify
themselves as “independent,” and 34 percent of those independents
identify themselves as conservative. A little more than half of that
subgroup cite Fox as their “most trusted” news source. The rest are what
Robert P. Jones, the chief executive of the Public Religion Research
Institute, identified as “a growth margin” for the network; they could
be what the poll identified as “Fox News Independents,” but they don’t
know it yet. Unlike the more hard-core “Fox News Republicans,” these
independents are less likely to call themselves members of the Tea
Party, are more open to allowing the children of illegal immigrants to
stay here legally and slightly more approving of the president’s job
performance (15 percent for Fox News Independents, as opposed to 5
percent for Fox News Republicans).
How
does Ailes maintain the aging conservative base that has allowed him to
control the present while at the same time drawing in younger and
independent viewers that will allow him to grow and control the future?
Fox News, in this way, is confronted by the same problem the Republican
Party faces, and Ailes appears to be solving his problem the way anyone
hoping to build a winning national coalition must: by emphasizing
personality.
When
Ted Turner started CNN, he proclaimed that “the news is the star.”
Ailes, on the other hand, has always been a vocal believer in the power
of personality. He was the one who, as a young producer of “The Mike
Douglas Show,” advised Richard Nixon to embrace the power of television,
and who, as a professional political adviser, taught George H. W. Bush
how to best Dan Rather in an interview. Ailes knows as well as any
television professional alive that personality is the essence of the
medium — he called his 1987 self-help book “You Are the Message,” a wink
at Marshall McLuhan’s insight that the medium is the message, and
subtitled it “Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are.” Ailes’s
advice was just what you would expect: “If you can get the audience to
pull for you, you’ll always win.”
The
challenge, then, was to get everyone pulling for the same guy. In this
regard, Bill O’Reilly, 65, has been the prototypical Fox personality. A
former correspondent for ABC News who never quite fit the broadcast
mold, he grew up in Levittown, on Long Island, and could throw buckets
of regular-white-guy resentment at the camera with an uncanny panache.
His nightly sign off, “We’re definitely looking out for you,” could
easily translate to “We’re in this together.” He has been the top-rated
star in all of cable for 13 years running. (And often the best-selling
nonfiction author in America as well.) O’Reilly presents himself as a
right-leaning populist, with his regular references to “secular
progressives” and “the radical left.” But every once in a while he’ll
take an unexpected position, say, like his support for some modest gun
controls. As O’Reilly told me in a phone interview in November, his show
“isn’t a consistent ideological presentation because that doesn’t
really work anymore.” A predictable ideological line, he said, is “a
niche thing. You can still make a good living doing it, but if you want
to be wide, you’ve gotta have a bunch of dimensions.”
‘Our critics are always like, “She wore red for Republicans.” They don’t cover it when you wear blue.’
The
last time Pew studied it, in 2012, O’Reilly’s audience was 52 percent
Republican, 30 percent independent and 15 percent Democratic. The show
that followed his for many years, “Hannity,” with the conservative
talk-radio host Sean Hannity, who takes a more traditional Republican
line, had an audience that was 65 percent Republican, 22 percent
independent and 6 percent Democratic. In speaking to me, Ailes, while
complimentary of Hannity as “a unique personality,” also called his show
“segmented.” It is no coincidence that, as part of Kelly’s professional
development, Ailes made her a regular guest on O’Reilly, where she had
to frequently debate him, stand her ground and occasionally mouth off.
Finally he moved Kelly into Hannity’s 9 p.m. slot, bumping him to 10
p.m.
I
can find no polls that break down the ideological views of Kelly’s
audience, and Ailes himself says he does not even have an official
Q-score, the industrywide benchmark for TV talent, to rate her by. He
says he doesn’t need one. “I have the Q-score,” he told me, pointing at
his head.
He
also has the ratings. “The Kelly File” is the only cable-news program
in the 9 p.m. time slot to show year-over-year growth in overall
viewership and in the 25-to-54 demographic. In November, when she was
covering the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., Kelly beat O’Reilly among the
25-to-54 demographic, marking the first time any Fox star had done so
without audience-boosting presidential debates or conventions running
into their time slots. Kelly ended 2014 just behind O’Reilly, holding
second place in all of cable news. In her own time slot, she is ahead of
everyone, not just in news but on all of basic cable: “Duck Dynasty,”
“Mob Wives,” everything but sports. For Roger Ailes, Megyn is clearly
the message.
Kelly, who is
now 44, grew up in Ailes’s America, in a middle-class suburb of Albany
called Delmar. She was the youngest of three children, worked as a
fitness instructor and went to Mass most Sundays. Her father was an
education professor at the State University of New York at Albany, and
her mother ran the behavioral-health department at a Veterans
Administration hospital. As a teenager in the late 1980s, she lived in a
mall rat’s bubble of tall hair, leg warmers and Bon Jovi; one of the
popular kids, she was the type who also had friends among the other
groups at Bethlehem Central High School, with names like the Dirties
(hackeysack-playing stoners) and the Creamies (choir geeks). Reality
intruded early. Ten days before Christmas, when Kelly was 15, her father
died of a heart attack. He had canceled some of his life-insurance
coverage just two months earlier. Money had been tight, and Kelly’s
mother had to worry about the mortgage and other expenses. In her senior
yearbook, Megyn listed her future hopes in three words: “College,
government, wealth.”
Kelly
took a high-school aptitude test that, in a perhaps rare moment of
accuracy for such tests, suggested that her ideal career was news. She
applied to Syracuse in hopes of attending its well-regarded
communications program; she was accepted to the school but rejected from
the program, so she majored in political science instead. She won a
seat in the student senate and was assigned to a panel that investigated
faculty sexual-harassment cases, which in turn, she says, piqued her
interest in becoming a prosecutor. But after she got her J.D. from
Albany Law School in 1995 and found herself facing $100,000 in student
loans, she decided to pursue a better-paying career in corporate
litigation.
She
applied to several firms, including Bickel & Brewer, which hired
her to work in its Chicago office, which at that point had no female
associates. Robert Cummins, then a partner at the firm, now 81, told me
that he asked some of the other associates to take her out to see if she
could handle the firm’s macho culture. She could. After about two years
there she sought, and landed, a plum position at the prestigious firm
of Jones Day, bouncing between its Chicago, New York and, finally,
Washington offices. She had married Daniel Kendall, a doctor, but they
were growing apart. On track to make partner, she was also exhausted,
heading toward divorce and wondering about the direction her life had
taken.
In
2003, she cut a TV news demo tape with help from a friend and began
cold-calling station managers. The only one she could persuade to see
her in person was Bill Lord, then the news director of WJLA, the ABC
affiliate in Washington. Lord told me that he had never given a job to
somebody off the street with no experience, but Kelly’s tape and the
interview impressed him. “She was very intelligent, there’s just no
getting around it,” he said. “She was enormously confident. She seemed
very, very motivated. She had ideas.” He hired her on a tryout basis one
day a week, which quickly led to two days, then to three, then to four.
Her priorities were getting the story and beating the competition but
never pushing any political ideology, at least as far as Lord could
tell. In Lord’s admiring view, “it was all motivated by ambition, I
think, all of it. She really wanted to succeed.” Lord was ready to give
her a full-time job, and they began negotiating a two-year contract.
Kelly says that’s when she realized she might be able to aim much
higher.
Competing
network executives I have spoken to agree that Kelly could have gone
from WJLA to any of the major networks. Jonathan Klein, the CNN/US
president from 2004 through 2010, told me it was one of his big regrets
that he did not snag Kelly early on. “If you’d have asked me who was the
one talent you’d want to have from somewhere else, from another
network, I would have said — and did — Megyn Kelly,” Klein told me. “She
just hits the right notes.”
But
Kelly says Fox was the only other place she wanted to work. “I
literally had two hats out there.” Kelly told me. “One was WJLA and one
was Fox News.” (Later, it is worth noting, Kelly modified that
self-assessment. Had MSNBC called 10 years earlier, before Fox, she
would have gone happily. “I’d have done O.K. there, too,” she said.) In
2004, at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner in
Washington, she struck up a conversation with Bill Sammon, then a
correspondent for The Washington Times and a regular contributor to Fox
News. He urged her to send a tape to the Fox Washington bureau chief,
Kim Hume, who had defected to Fox News from ABC News, followed by her
husband, Brit Hume.
“Attractive-looking
blond anchorwomen are not rare,” Brit Hume, now a senior political
analyst, told me. “Attractive-looking blond anchorwomen who speak with a
fierce authority are rare. In fact, attractive looking anybody who
speaks with that kind of authority are rare.” Even better, he said, “she
believed in our mission, and she thought that the news was not balanced
properly the way it was being presented by the other main outlets, and
that was part of the reason she was interested in coming here. That
combination, to say that’s rare — it’s off-the-charts rare.”
Hume
sent her tape to Roger Ailes, who did not need much convincing. “She’s
obviously a beautiful girl, beautiful woman and very intelligent, law
degree, a lot of credentials there,” he recalled when I spoke to him in
December. “She has an excellent voice, and a lot of people overlook
voice.” Best of all, he said, she reminded him of “the kids I hired here
who go to SUNY and work two jobs and try to make it.”
Every once in
a while Kelly will replay clips from those early days for viewers,
mostly to make fun of herself. “Watch the poise and confidence here,”
she’ll joke. In her first segments for Hume’s show, “Special Report,” or
on “The Fox Report” with Shepard Smith, she was stiff, serious, almost
timid. The segments could just as easily have been on one of the
broadcast networks: new trends in sentencing for nonviolent offenders,
Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s thyroid treatment.
She
began to draw attention beyond the Fox News universe in April 2006 with
a series of reports on the “Duke lacrosse” case, in which a 27-year-old
black woman accused three white members of the Duke University lacrosse
team of sexually assaulting her at a party where she performed as a
hired stripper. Most of the news coverage treated the case as a test of
racial privilege and justice. Kelly took a decidedly different approach.
Frequently citing “defense sources,” she was often first with an
escalating series of stories that cast serious doubt on the accuser.
Media critics on the left vilified her for her coverage, but the case
eventually unraveled, and prosecutors dropped the charges.
Ailes
was pleased with her early work but less so her presentation. “I
brought her up and sat her down, and I said: ‘Megyn, you have to show
vulnerability. You’re working so hard, as many people do when they come
into the business, to prove they are worthy of the job. They’re
terrified of mistakes and appear to be protecting themselves on the
air.' ” Which was fine, so far as it went. But Ailes had a different
view of television, and he encouraged Kelly to embrace it. “People
expect to see a human being, a range of emotions,” he said.
Kelly
developed that emotional range by pursuing a series of red-meat stories
and allegations driven by the boiling anger of the Tea Party era: that
Barack Obama was pursuing a “socialist-like agenda,” that the community-organizing group Acorn would rely on the likes of “child rapists”
to help conduct the U.S. Census, that the Department of Justice was
refusing to enforce laws against voter intimidation, at least when those
doing the intimidating were black and their victims were white.
While
all this was happening, Kelly got married (in 2008, to Doug Brunt, then
an Internet entrepreneur) and got her own show (“America Live,” in
2010). In the spring of 2011, she and Brunt had their second child,
Yardly. (They now have a third.) While Kelly was away on maternity
leave, the conservative radio host Mike Gallagher lamented her absence
during a radio chat with Kelly’s colleague Chris Wallace. Gallagher
called her maternity leave “a racket,” as if it were some kind of
work-avoidance scheme.
Robin Roberts, the ‘Good Morning America’ host, grabbed her by the arm and whispered in her ear, ‘I get you.’
He
did not know it, but he was to become the target of what was arguably
the inaugural Megyn moment. On Kelly’s first day back, in August, she
invited Gallagher onto her show and proceeded to strafe him mercilessly.
“The United States is the only advanced country that doesn’t require
paid leave,” Kelly told him. “If anything, the United States is in the
dark ages when it comes to maternity leave. And what is it about getting
pregnant and carrying a baby nine months that you don’t think deserves a
few months off so bonding and recovery can take place? Hmm?” When
Gallagher asked whether men were entitled to the same time off, Kelly
informed him that indeed they were. “It’s called the Family Medical
Leave Act,” she said.
The moment did not go unnoticed. “Megyn Kelly Demolishes Mike Gallagher,” a Huffington Post headline
cheered. Gawker called it a “feminist triumph.” Even the progressive
group Media Matters for America, which closely monitors Fox, credited her performance. (Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” was not buying it
and showed clips in which Kelly questioned the need for men to take
long paternity leaves and criticized entitlements in general. In a later
phone conversation, Kelly confronted Stewart, arguing that he had taken
devil’s-advocate questions out of context to make them seem like her
positions. “Typical Stewart,” she said. “He wouldn’t budge.”)
Then,
a year later, came the Megyn moment that made her career, with Rove on
election night 2012. She was the co-anchor with Bret Baier, the
anchorman of “Special Report.” By 10 p.m. or so, as Republican hopes for
the presidency were starting to dim, Rove was on the Fox News set
insisting that Romney still had a chance. “Is this just the math that
you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is it real?”
Kelly snapped.
Rove
would not back down. At 11:13 p.m., Fox declared Ohio, and thus the
election, for Obama. Rove disputed the call, running through his own
numbers from bellwether precincts. Kelly began laughing and deadpanned,
“That’s awkward.”
Ailes
was prepared, of course. Intentionally or not, Rove was speaking for a
portion of the Fox News audience that found the result inconceivable, in
part because many Fox News hosts and guests had questioned polls that
predicted it. Fox producers had rehearsed a live walk to the “decision
desk,” the conference room where Fox’s election analysts did their work,
three days earlier. Around 11:30 p.m., with Rove still hanging on to
hope, Ailes called the control room from home and told producers to send
Kelly in.
Kelly’s
command of the moment was total. She waved at producers, on-air
colleagues and stagehands, goading her cameramen to “keep coming” and
smiling broadly. And when she finally reached the decision desk, she had
the numbers crunchers tick through all the reasons Rove, who once
called himself the keeper of “the Math,” was wrong — totally,
inexorably, hopelessly wrong.
The
moment has been endlessly cited, in part because it was so freighted:
Here was perhaps the most hated man in liberal America being humiliated
on what should have been his home turf. And here was his beautiful and
merciless tormentor, Megyn Kelly, confounding expectations about her
network. After showing a replay of Kelly’s performance the following
day, Stewart told his audience:
“Did you see it? Did you record it? Did you TiVo it? Because you can
play it backwards and forwards backwards and forwards all day long like I
did today.” The Times media columnist David Carr wrote that Kelly had
appeared to be “speaking for many of us,” and that, at least in this one
confrontation, Fox News had “landed firmly on the side of journalism,
the facts and a narrative based on reality as opposed to partisan
fantasy.”
A few days
before the midterm election last November, Kelly was in her office
thinking about wardrobe. Elections, even midterm elections, are major
events for television news organizations. Eight different outfits were
hanging on a rolling clothes rack beside her desk. “I don’t really like
wearing royal blue or red because it’s so anchor-y,” she said as she
picked through the rack. Kelly is aware that her clothing choices are
sometimes parsed for ideological content. “Our critics are always like,
‘She wore red for Republicans.’ They don’t cover it when you wear blue.”
She fell into a mock whisper, as if to indicate what they might say if
they did: “ 'Oh, she’s a secret Democrat.' ” She raised both hands to
her mouth, looked at me and mimed an expression of total horror.
Megyn Kelly on Fox News
CreditFox News
As
Kelly’s star has risen, so has the scrutiny. O’Reilly had warned her:
“They’re going to come after you.” This has made the balancing act of
her on-screen persona — between her maverick moments on the one hand,
and her still-reliable taste for red-meat topics on the other — an
increasingly delicate one. In December 2013, she became a figure of
ridicule on “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” for asserting that
Santa Claus, contrary to the claim of a tongue-in-cheek essay in Slate,
was incontrovertibly Caucasian.
(She said she was joking, too, and lamented the tendency of others to
“race bait.”) And in October 2014, the NBC affiliate in Denver debunked her report
that a new Colorado law would allow voters to print their own ballots
and give them to “collectors,” raising the specter of voter fraud, a
frequent subject of Fox News alarm. That turned out not to be the case.
“We normally reserve our truth tests for political ads, but that claim
is misleading,” the 9News co-anchor Kyle Clark told his viewers. (Kelly
called the fallout on liberal blogs “a nothing burger,” though she later
corrected the report.) Yet she drew far more attention in June for telling Dick Cheney,
the former vice president, “Time and time again history has proved that
you got it wrong in Iraq, sir.” Jon Stewart showed the clip on “The
Daily Show” and even did a little happy dance at his desk.
Before
the 10-hour election special began, Ailes gathered his entire news team
in a large conference room. The exit-poll data was showing a big
Republican night. Ailes gave his usual pep talk. “Be sure to maintain a
conversational tone, a pleasant attitude and a good energy level on the
air,” he said. “Audiences like real people. We built this network on
that.”
As
the coverage went live, there was an unmistakable air of giddiness in
the studio. During an on-air visit to the anchor desk, the Fox Business
anchor Neil Cavuto told Kelly and Baier that they looked as if they
should be on a wedding cake. Kelly joked about the name of the
Democratic candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, by
pretending to mistake him for the author Tom Wolfe. “He wrote all those
great books, oh, wait!” she said, a joke perhaps more appropriate for
egghead Manhattanites than for Fox News Independents. In the end, Kelly
decided to wear a black skirt suit, a white blouse and gold-and-white
stilettos. “Black is classic and you always want to be a little classic
on election night, you know?”
For
all the apparent predictability of the night, Fox News even managed to
find some excitement. Ed Gillespie, the former Bush adviser and a close
friend of Rove’s, was doing better than expected in his Virginia race
against Mark Warner, the Democratic senator. “There’s a lot of drama yet
to be had,” Kelly said. It was hard not to wonder whether the broadcast
networks had made a bad decision that night in deciding to devote only
an hour, starting at 10 p.m., to the national elections in which Senate
control would flip. While the Virginia drama was playing out, NBC was
showing the sitcom “About a Boy” and CBS was showing its crime drama
“NCIS.” ABC was running a special about the 75th anniversary of Marvel
Comics, which is owned by Disney, ABC’s own parent company, a dubious
move that went largely unnoticed by media critics on election night.
Fox’s
audience wound up being more than double those of CNN and MSNBC
combined. And it beat all of the broadcast networks, including, for the
first time, in the 25-to-54 demographic category. This may be because
the networks have finally thrown in the towel. The Tyndall Report, which
analyzes broadcast news coverage, reported that their 6:30 p.m.
newscasts devoted less time to the midterm elections and domestic policy
in 2014 than in any year since it started keeping track in 1990; the
top story was “winter weather.” (Tyndall did credit CBS for significant
coverage of Syria and Iraq.)
The
drama around Gillespie’s possible upset went only so far; he did
eventually lose. But the Republicans were otherwise rolling along. It
even seemed as if Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator, a
friend of Fox (as an occasional paid analyst), might pull off a squeaker
in his bid to unseat Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. But it
was not to be, the Fox decision desk ruled.
Brown’s
campaign tried to argue that 25,000 outstanding votes could make the
difference. Once again, it fell to Kelly to shut an intransigent
Republican down. She got up from her desk and removed her earpiece. “You
know the walk by now,” she said, looking into the camera. As she headed
to the conference room for another explanation from the data crunchers,
she told Rove over her shoulder: “Just be glad it’s not you this time.”
Sheepish,
Rove, who was standing off set awaiting his next hit, started walking
after her. “For once,” he said, “We’re following you.”
A couple of days
after the election, I met Kelly and her husband for breakfast at a
French restaurant a few blocks from their apartment on the Upper West
Side, which is not exactly Fox Nation. No one recognized her. On
television she is all heavy black mascara, high-gloss lipstick and blown
out blond hair. In person she goes with very little makeup, keeps her
hair pinned back above her ears and dresses modestly: on this morning
she wore an overlarge black T-shirt, black jeans, high Prada boots and a
chunky crystal around her neck, the spiritual significance of which she
swore not to know.
As
on television, though, Kelly speaks in a jazz-improv progression of
italics, all-caps and boldface. Her husband, Doug Brunt — eight months
younger than Kelly at 43 — is youthful and soft-spoken, and he seems
content to let Kelly keep the spotlight. He once ran an Internet
security firm that helped corporations fend off hackers and system
saboteurs, but he sold it, and now he’s pursuing his fantasy job of
writing novels.
I
wanted to know how Kelly and Brunt were getting used to her fame and,
yes, mainstream acceptance. Brunt said the most stirring moment came in
October, when Kelly was hosting her show from the oceanside in Dana
Point, Calif., where she was attending Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful
Women Summit. Unexpectedly, an enormous crowd began to gather. “It was
one of those moments when you see how big it has become,” Brunt said.
What
happened inside the conference, which was a gathering of the most
powerful women in business, was no less extraordinary. Sheryl Sandberg,
the chief operating officer of Facebook, who wrote “Lean In,” was to
interview Kelly on the main stage. Sandberg introduced Kelly with a clip from a celebrated Megyn moment from 2013, in which she challenged the conservative commentator
Erick Erickson for saying that the national increase in female
breadwinners ran counter to the biologically determined order. “Who died
and made you scientist in chief?” Kelly asked him.
The
conference hall erupted in cheers, and Sandberg herself, who worked in
the Clinton administration before her hiring at Facebook, audibly
whooped. “I saw that on TV,” she told the crowd, “and I just cold-called
her and said ‘I love you, you are awesome.' ”
By
then, Time magazine had already named Kelly as one of the 100 “most
influential people in the world” for 2014. The only other television
journalist to win the distinction was Charlie Rose, who invited her to
lunch. (In an email to me, he complimented Kelly as “a savvy young woman
who knows what she wants” and is “obviously doing something right.”)
She got to sit next to Seth Meyers at the black-tie gala, and a few
months later appeared on his show. She was also invited to host the
Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame awards at the Waldorf-Astoria with
Bob Costas. Backstage, Robin Roberts, the “Good Morning America” host,
grabbed her by the arm and whispered in her ear, “I get you.” NBC
expressed interest in hiring her, as did CNN, which gave Ailes added
incentive to award her a prime-time slot.
Of course, Brunt and Kelly know that acceptance only goes so far. When Kelly got her 9 p.m. show, Media Matters sounded an alarm,
calling her “a much more pernicious purveyor of political propaganda”
than other Fox News stars, with a unique ability to “pluck
misinformation and imbue it with a veneer of legitimacy.” (She ignores
Media Matters, she says: “They exist to destroy Fox News.”) Then there
are those occasional New York dinner parties. “You’re talking about your
life, and then they’ll be like, ‘How can you stand working at Fox
News?' ” Kelly said while picking at a frittata. “And that’s not polite
dinner conversation.”
Brunt
confessed that, more recently, it got to him more than it got to her.
“These days it doesn’t ruffle you,” he said to her. Either way, it’s all
fodder for his novels. His latest, “The Means,” revolves around a young
litigator, Samantha Davis, who decides she needs to change her life.
She seeks a job at the hot cable-news network, UBS, and after a
by-the-gut news executive is struck by her beauty and brains, gets her
big chance. Under his gentle guidance — she does not require much —
success follows. “America wants more,” her best friend says.
Readers
looking for clues about Kelly’s true political leanings might find them
in the book’s dramatic climax, in which Samantha uncovers a scandal
that causes a Democratic president to lose his re-election bid. Evidence
of right-wing bias? Not so fast: At the very end of the novel, it turns
out that Samantha had been manipulated by a source, and that the story
she broke was untrue. The Democrat was taken down unfairly. Samantha
determines to clear his name. Now you wouldn’t know what to think.
Alone on the
wall behind Roger Ailes’s desk in the Fox News headquarters is a rather
grim oil painting, framed in gold, of a Revolutionary War-era warship
tossed by an angry sea. Ailes bought it at an antique shop 30 years ago
and has no idea who painted it. He saw it as “a ship headed into the
wind alone, and I thought, That’s my life.” He seems to consider it part
of his job to view things that way.
When
I visited him in late December, he could hardly even pretend to be
alone. Though the overall news audience was down for all of the cable
networks, Fox was ending the year as the second-most-watched basic-cable
network in prime time, up from third in 2013, and was the only
cable-news network to see any audience growth during prime time. “This
channel’s still growing,” Ailes told me. “You’re going to see over the
next 10 years, this thing is going to grow even bigger.”
As
for Kelly, Ailes said, she had a long way to go to become one of the
truly great television news talents, a distinction he reserves for
Walter Cronkite, Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters and, of course, Bill
O’Reilly. But, he said, “we’ve been on the air for 18 years. She shows
up, and in one year goes to No. 2 and close to No. 1. That is an
astounding accomplishment. Before this is over, she may be bigger than
anybody.”
Ailes
said he hoped one day to outperform the broadcast-news divisions, a
dream that might seem absurd, given that the networks still draw a
normal, nonelection night audience of eight million viewers or more on a
regular basis. But his plan to reach a broader audience seems to be
working. In April, Joe Klein, the liberal-leaning columnist for Time, complained to an audience
at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan about how television news is turning
away from covering politics and government. “I miss being able to turn
on a straight newscast,” he said. “And it turns out the only place you
can go to get one at 6 o’clock at night is Fox.” Other Americans are
reaching the same conclusion. Kelly beat the networks on election night,
and now Bret Baier’s hourlong newscast at 6 p.m., “Special Report,”
frequently beats the ABC or CBS newscasts in select markets, including
Atlanta, St. Louis and even Baltimore, a Democratic stronghold.
“They used to laugh at us in the mainstream media,” Ailes said, “but we’re becoming the place most people go to get the truth.”LLC 501C- 4 UCC 1-308.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE
Content and Programming Copyright 2014 By Patcnews The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network © LLC UCC 1-308.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE All copyrights reserved By Patcnews The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network Copyright 2014 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of CQ-Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content. © All Copyrights reserved By Patcnews The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network
No comments:
Post a Comment