The Fox News PR machine has capitalized on Megyn Kelly's charade as a debate moderator, parlaying it into high-profile interviews on late night talk shows and morning news shows, and a new book she has in the works promises another round of media attention later this year. These interviews provide the media with an opportunity to question her about the misinformation she promotes on her own show, when she's out of the national spotlight, but few are taking advantage.
Kelly's supposed persona as a breath of fresh air and an unbiased journalist on Fox News -- bolstered by her position moderating the network's presidential debates -- has led to a series of laudatory profiles that have often willfully ignored her troubled past pushing conservative misinformation and bigotry.
Kelly has been called a “take-no-prisoners newswoman” who “isn't afraid to throw hardballs at Republicans” and “the brightest star at Fox News.” That pretense was reinforced by the journalists and pundits across the political spectrum who stepped up to defend Kelly after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attacked her, kicking off a feud with the network and then declining to participate in its January 28 presidential debate.
Late night talk shows and morning news shows have not been immune to Kelly's hardball-throwing façade.
On the February 5 edition of ABC's Good Morning America, host George Stephanopoulos gave Kelly a platform to gratuitously boost her credibility as a political journalist and respond to Donald Trump's attacks without asking about any of her controversial remarks.
Kelly has also appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and has an upcoming high-profile scheduled appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert's post-Super Bowl episode, as well as a new book deal. In his interview, Fallon told Kelly that he didn't “really know your work as much until I saw you for the first Republican debate -- you were fantastic in that ... People that don't know you have to be like, 'Oh who is this person? She's phenomenal.'”
Megyn Kelly's so-called “phenomenal” reputation in the media lacks important context, found in the full spectrum of her time at Fox, including her problematic history on subjects including race and gender.
In the first two weeks of 2016, Kelly spent over 1 hour and 22 minutes promoting Michael Bay's myth-filled Benghazi movie “13 Hours” as “the gripping new film that may pose a threat to Hillary Clinton's hopes for the White House.” She's used her prime-time Fox show to push falsehoods about Planned Parenthood, most recently asking whether a “political hit job” was at play in the grand jury indictment of two members of the group that released deceptively edited smear videos to attack the organization.
She regularly hosts Tony Perkins, the leader of an anti-LGBT hate group, and has shown a penchant for inflammatory rhetoric on race, ranging from blaming a 14-year-old black teenager who was the victim of a police officer's use of excessive force to calling Black Lives Matter protesters “beyond the bounds of decency.”
When positive press praises Kelly's “occasionally, yet highly entertaining, bucking of the conservative party line,” they downplay the fact that her show “is made up largely of the kind of stories you'd find on many other Fox News shows.” Even the writer of Vanity Fair's glowing cover story, after making those observations, eventually noted that Kelly's “talent for fearmongering may be even more insidious than Trump's own. She, after all, is considered by many to be the reasonable one at Fox.”