I’m making a conscious choice about how I’m covering Megyn Kelly and her interviews from here on out. While these are media stories and Megyn is technically employed by NBC News, I do not consider Meghan a journalist. She is a media personality, not unlike the now-neutered Bill O’Reilly, or someone like Glenn Beck. She’s there to “entertain,” so don’t buy it when you’re told that Megyn should be viewed as a journalist.
Anyway, the knives are out for media personality Megyn. Sh-t came to a head last week when the promos for Megyn’s interview with wingnut loon and “Sandy Hook denier” Alex Jones came out – I covered the situation here. There was even a rumor that the Alex Jones interview might be pulled, out of respect for the Sandy Hook families. It was not pulled. It aired last night, although sources claim that NBC News edited the sh-t out of it and they made Megyn sit down with a Sandy Hook father for what amounted to an on-air rebuttal of Alex Jones’ lunacy. You can read a summary of what went down in the interview here. To be fair, many sites say that Megyn “won” the interview, because Alex Jones came across like a sweaty, stammering idiot. Sure. But at what cost? I’m not going to excerpt from the interview, nor will I embed any videos. The local NBC affiliate in Connecticut wouldn’t even air it.
Alex Jones tried to “destroy” Megyn Kelly too – he apparently secretly recorded her during the hours they spent with each other, and he got her saying that she’s not out to get him, etc. Which is what anyone would say to get an interview with a paranoid loon, honestly. He’s still threatening to “destroy” her and release the tapes he has of their interview. Best to just ignore him. I’m saying that to everyone, every media outlet, every journalist. I know Donald Trump listens to Jones. But no one else should.
As I said, though, the knives are out for Megyn. I tend to think that there are people in NBC News who are not happy about anything to do with Megyn’s show, Megyn’s hiring, and Megyn’s performance thus far. Someone (?) leaked some unedited portions of Megyn’s interview with Vladimir Putin over the weekend, and she was basically acting as if she worked for Russia’s state-run media. HuffPo ran a detailed story with quotes from ex-CIA officials and current network journalists questioning the terrible decision to send Megyn – who has no foreign policy background or foreign affairs background – to interview someone like Putin.
Photos courtesy of WENN, NBC.
She’ll be fired soon.
My fear is she will bring down MSNBC. My network has completely changed this last year. While Nicolle Wallace has turned out to be a refreshing voice, Greta’s tired, chipper normalizing of Trump was expected. Now I see adds for right-wing conspiracy nuts (endorsed by Limbaugh) and cheerleading commercials aimed at Deplorables. They gambled and lost in the aim to attract Trump’s fans, which anyone who even casually follows politics could have predicted.
Interview was on NBC.
I know. MSNBC is part of NBC. MK has a Sunday night show on MSNBC. If NBC news needs to cut costs, I believe it will be MSNBC that pays the price.
I think she’s in over her head. The Jones debacle made NBC look bad, and she looked foolish. I thought she was fine with Putin. Was Megyn Putin’s choice for interviewer? It doesn’t make sense she was chosen. A small part of Putin’s interview did not make the cut. Then NBC changed their minds and released it. Why is that? Megyn should have stayed where she was.
Her interview with Putin made her look like a rank amateur. She needs to stick to subjects that she can lob softball questions at. She is NOT qualified to kiss the feet of true journalists.
Her interview with Putin wasn’t fine. She pandered to him and didn’t question him about human rights abuses.
And she defended Putin when his performance was criticized. She’s pretty tone deaf.
I don’t know. I really thought NBC might pull the interview because it seemed like to pressure to do so was pretty intense. I haven’t watched but if she did paint him as the monster he is then I’d grudgingly call this a win, maybe. I don’t think anything can be considered a win, though, until Trump and his enablers like Jones are relegated to the footnotes of history where they belong.
I absolutely refused to watch it and will not watch her show from here on out (I probably wasn’t going to anyway…), that may be petty and b!tchy, but IDGAF…
And somewhere Tamron Hall is laughing like the boss she is.
Yes and cuddled up with her love Lawrence feeling a delicious sense of schadenfreude.
LO and Tamron are involved?? That Lawrence?
Really. Eh, I can see that. Lawrence likes his ladies smart.
From purely business perspective it was a bad decision to employ her because she’s alienated all the deplorables via her war with Trump. But she’s still the sh**head that insisted Jesus and Santa is white. And no matter how she wants to present herself as a serious journalist she clearly is out of her depth. I hope Tamron Hall is laughing her ass of somewhere watching this with a martini in hand.
“But she’s still the sh**head that insisted Jesus and Santa is white.”
This^^^
No, she won nothing and we all lost. In fact, we lost when NBC swapped out Tamron Hall and spent 17mil on Megyn ‘Santa is WHITE!!’ Kelly aka Megyn ’14yr old 90lb African American girls in Bikinis at suburban swim parties, deserve to be tackled and sat on by cops, because after all ‘they are NO SAINTS!’ Kelly.
Here is what we know.
Alex Jones is a racist, sexist creepy loon, who did tape Kelly in all his paranoia and has her promising to go easy on him.
After the early promotions were seen, and Kelly was riding and posing in Jone’s sports car – then asking him fluff questions with a cutesy smile the OUTRAGE exploded all over her and nbc. They ran scared and re-tooled the segment with harsher and more critical voice over narration.
The so called “tougher” interview is a creation – it didn’t occur initially, and only happened due to the protests and outcry – to save their bottom line amid advertisers fleeing.
WORD.
No lies detected.
i want everyone to take note…. like the larger establishment… when you try to operate on white privilege and ridiculousness (bumping tamron and her fox news shenanigans) and think that you will win…its massive karma…Megyn Kelly GOOD RIDDANCE
Well said!
I do agree that he is newsworthy, so I was never against the interview, BUT I do think the criticism helped this become a very good piece. It was clear that they re-edited and added interviews in.
Overall, I thought Megyn proved herself *on this one*. I don’t buy the rumors that NBC is unhappy with her…yet.
I don’t like “Foxy” Megyn and said I wouldn’t watch the interview but I did. I thought she did well. To me this is a woman who doesn’t like criticism, and trump gave it to her in droves. I think that was the genesis of her interview with Jones. He is a large windbag of hate with a lot of followers, but many middle of the road people don’t know who he is. Now they do. She mentioned throughout in many different ways that trump and Jones are members of the mutual admiration society. Just watching him, you know what trash he is, and now everyone knows this trash is buds with trump. I commend the fox princess on this one, even if it was over her hurt feelings.
I’m sure they did edit it after all the backlash they should have seen coming 100 miles away.
She’s still trash and so is NBC for hiring her.
I didn’t watch the interview because he is a vile human being and I can’t bother spending my time or energy on him.
I know I’ll get flamed for this, but I thought Megyn Kelly did a pretty good job during the campaign debates asking tough questions of Republicans. She did much better than many TV journalists. I don’t think she’s the best journalist on the planet, but there’s a sliding scale in my book. Generally speaking, the best reporters work for the major papers (WaPo, NYT) and mags (New Yorker, Bloomberg). TV reporters in general aren’t as good but of that group, she’s really not that bad.
Kelly “gets tough” to get noticed, not to uncover the truth. She faked being a real journalist long enough to get hired by NBC, but she doesn’t have the chops to truly do the job.
You know what? The Putin interview debacle is on NBC. Megyn is a dumb non-journalist. I don’t care if she whined and batted eyelashes to get the interview, whoever has some brains in that company should have realized that she didn’t have the training nor experience to handle a ruthless and slick operator like Putin. Everything from her attire (80’s bordello madam) to her lack of political / diplomacy knowledge screamed softball interview. If they’d assign her the story of “Putin at his dacha” or “Putin playing hockey” that would be one thing. But to have her pretend play a hard hitting journalist is insulting to the profession and demonstrates lack of integrity from NBC. Are they so desperate to play up Megyn, their little trophy blonde asset? They’ll suffer the consequences via lower ratings.
I won’t dignify the interview with slime ball Jones with a comment. Anything that comes Megyn’s / NBC’s way as a result of that is fully deserved.
Hey NBC – you could have chosen to shine a light on the insanity by: interviewing Sandy Hook parents who will forever grieve on how this lowlife and his followers are attacking them and hurting them; you could have interviewed people who are familiar with his divorce and shown clips of his lawyer saying “he plays a role on his show”. You could chosen to pick apart some of his conspiracy sh*t theories by providing data and evidence that it’s all made up by him. But no – you gave him a platform, so shame on you.
10000 yes
Things aren’t going well for Megyn Kelly and I AM HERE FOR IT!!!
Didn’t watch, Kelly is a dimwit & I despise the idea of giving Jones a platform from which to speak.
Jones needs to be covered so people know what evil lurks but this idiot is not the one to do it. But Jones would never agree to an interview with Leslie Stahl or Martha RADDATZ
NBC really messed up hiring this one. She’s giving them a bad rep. While I appreciate her making a fool of Alex Jones (really not hard to do), his minions see this as a victory, which is not good. Fueling any of their misguided beliefs is no bueno.
Kelly just doesn’t have any journalistic talent. The fact that she called herself part Mike Wallace shows how dim and self aggrandizing she is.
I understand that NBC is desperate to justify hiring her by getting the most provocative interview subjects but Kelly’s lack of talent only gives these subjects a freak show quality. Kelly is the wrong person to put our bizarre political culture into perspective or help us understand the causes of dysfunction.
To be fair to Megyn, she only had about 20 minutes to interview Putin. A lot of these kinds of interviews usually last a few hours and there’s plenty of material for the network to condense into some kind of narrative. I’m not sure why they only had 20 minutes with Putin but I think any journalist (and yes I realize Megyn is not really a journalist) would have struggled to cover so much ground in just a short 20 minutes with Putin.
But again Megyn isn’t a journalist, doesn’t know how to approach these kinds of subjects and I doubt she asked any in depth hard-hitting questions. Not sure why she she was selected to interview him or why they agreed to just 20 minutes.
As for Alex Jones, I had no idea who he even was before Megyn decided to interview him and I would have preferred to not know who he was. I grew up not too far from Newtown, CT very close to the New York State/CT border on the NY side so it really hit close to home. My dad even knew a few people at his office who were related to students at the school.
I watched the entire show last night and found Megyn’s questions to be pretty much served up to stir as much controversy as possible. Her first segment was with Alex Jones (nut job — had never heard of him before last week) and the second was a wacked out piece on a medical marijuana delivery service in San Fran. The third was kinda neat, though — Americans moving to New Zealand which is my dream vacation. Opinion only — none of the segments really tried to make a point, which is sort of Journalism 101. (Although Alex Jones kinda made his own point.
I’m thinking the network and Megyn really need to boost ratings and are stirring the pot with gusto.
It was a bomb for Megyn. She came in third in the ratings behind reruns of 60 Minutes and America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Eheheheh. How exactly did NBC think hiring her was gonna work? Did they think she’d bring those sweet Fox ratings/viewers with her? Um, no, because those folks regard “mainstream media” like vampires regard garlic vodka. Did they think her journalistic skills were Wallace-worthy? Can’t imagine why, because she’s a Republitrix pot-stirrer, nothing more. Did they think she was likeable/smart enough to overcome her Fox rep–or make non-Fox audiences overlook her reputation? Come on. Did they think she was going to find stories that would top 60 MINUTES’? Bwhahahahahah… In short, she alienates everyone and is nowhere near skilled enough to overcome that. Fifteen million dollars worth of fail.
I am happy that they didn’t axe Savannah Guthrie to make way for this new blonde journalistic savant.
They should have pulled the interview (and never allowed it in the first place). Shame on them.
Her weaknesses are showing. At Fox all she had to do was bash liberals, Democrats and minorities. Now she has to work and her lack of depth and intelligence is showing. She is all talk tough like a hard-nosed female journalist who can wrestle with the big boys in a man’s world but then has nothing to back it up. I know at Fox it was enough to be blonde and able to string sentences together but she is not on par with other women on TV.
She thought she was better than the other Fox blondes because she had a better dye job and a decent hair cut.
Putin’s own citizens in Russia quizzed him harder on his yearly TV call-in show than Megyn Kelly. And that’s saying *something*. The running commentary of tweets on screen were even more eviscerating. When the people who suffer under the autocrat that is Vladimir Putin have more courage and tenacity to phone him up and tell him to his face that he’s screwing up the country, you have no excuse as an American with all of the privileges that affords you to not go in.
I have no sympathy for Megyn Kelly. This is the standard of journalism that people expect. Either shape up, or ship out.