Despite declaring that she was “done with politics,” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s morning talk show debut on NBC didn’t entirely go as planned. Journalists, Will & Grace fans, and much of Twitter took her to task when she asked a fan of the returning sitcom if watching it made him “become gay, because of Will.” To make matters worse, the already awkward situation immediately turned more so when Kelly said, “I think the Will & Grace thing and the gay thing is gonna work out great.” Kelly apparently can’t escape politically rife subject matter even when she tries, like during her ELLE interview a week prior.
Titled “Megyn Kelly Doesn’t Want To Be Political,” the interview nearly went south when writer Mattie Kahn pressed the Megyn Kelly TODAY host about the recent controversy concerning ESPN’s Jemele Hill. (Kahn writes, “Kelly does not want to talk about politics or Trump — so much so that she stands up and turns toward the door when I press her on Trump’s treatment of Hill.”) As for the conversation itself, it all started when Kelly responded to Kahn’s mentioning Hill’s name by saying the ESPN anchor “got political” when she “didn’t have to.”
Do you think she shouldn’t have?
I think there’s definitely a question about whether anybody working in a news organization should take an open political position. Do you disagree with that?
I guess I think that there’s a blurring of the lines now between a political position and a sense that when the President of United States says that some neo-Nazis are “very fine people,” you get pushed into [speaking out].
I’m not going to get into defending the President. You should go back and quote him directly if you’re going to do that. I’m not going to defend him or not defend him, but that quote you just gave me was wrong.
ELLE‘s editor inserted a brief line noting that, contrary to Kelly’s claim here, Trump did in fact insist there “were very fine people on both sides” of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, during a bonkers press conference at Trump Tower. So Kahn pressed Kelly further, asking if Hill’s initial remark about Trump being a white supremacist was “a political statement that no one that’s in the news business, even sports news, which is a kind of journalism, should make.” The NBC broadcaster refused to comment on Hill or her comments specifically, though she did admit it was “dicey territory”:
“One of the problems of 2017 journalism is journalists are under too much pressure to pick sides. That is not a fair position in which to put them. They’re supposed to report the news. If they choose to offer a political opinion, then they should expect rollback. If they haven’t expressed a political position, there should not be pressure on them to do that. That is not the job they signed up for.”
Considering the many examples from Kelly’s Fox News past that run counter to this, per a Last Week Tonight clip aired on Sunday, her answer here isn’t totally satisfactory. So Kahn pressed further, asking Kelly to compare her experience from the other side of “Trump’s Twitter machine” to Hill’s. “Is this a general journalism interview, or this is about my show? I don’t want to give an interview as a media expert. That’s not really what I signed up to do,” Kelly exclaimed in response. “If you want to talk about the show, we can talk about the show.”
Meanwhile, Hill herself responded to Kelly’s remarks about her with an appropriate tweet. She also threw in a joke about the former Kelly File host’s viral video “[setting] the record straight on Santa.”
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 25, 2017
(Via ELLE)