The mainstream media give high marks to Megyn Kelly, but that’s because they’re grading on a curve, believes Nation columnist Eric Alterman, who fumed recently about Vanity Fair’s February cover story on Kelly.
Alterman contended that writer Evgenia Peretz’s portrayal of Kelly as “a brave truth-teller, a feminist hero and a bit of a liberal” is “complete nonsense. That any of these descriptions are even imaginable is a tribute to Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and the rest of the far-right media/entertainment complex. They have moved America’s ideological goalposts so far rightward that a person can earn undeserved praise merely for not being the worst of the worst.”
“When you actually bother to examine Kelly’s record, it’s hard to avoid the fact that she’s really just a nicer looking Roger Ailes in a Valentino blouse,” sniped Alterman. “She’s incredibly good at what she does, and what she does best is distract attention from the malicious misinformation Fox News peddles on a daily basis—in part by calling out the right-wing lies that are so outrageous even Fox executives cannot bring themselves to defend them.”
From Alterman’s January 13 post (bolding added):
The thrust of the piece…is that [Kelly] is a brave truth-teller, a feminist hero and a bit of a liberal despite the right-wing environment in which she toils. This…is complete nonsense. That any of these descriptions are even imaginable is a tribute to Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and the rest of the far-right media/entertainment complex. They have moved America’s ideological goalposts so far rightward that a person can earn undeserved praise merely for not being the worst of the worst.
Take, for instance, Kelly’s credentials as a feminist. Peretz…did not include…Kelly’s own view of feminism, which she has said “connotes a harshness and almost a shrillness” that she finds “unattractive.” She demonstrates this distaste on the air quite frequently, like the time she defended Carly Fiorina’s slanderous lies about Planned Parenthood…
As for Kelly’s credentials as a liberal, Peretz explains that praise from the likes of “liberals such as Chris Matthews, Joy Behar, and Gayle King” has earned her this special respect…I could fill a good part of this magazine with comments Kelly has made that are not only illiberal but quite stupidly and maliciously so. What, for instance, can it mean to say, after President Obama has called the Benghazi attack “an act of terror,” that “Declaring something an act of terror does not necessarily mean you are declaring it a terror attack”?
As Jim Rutenberg explained in yet another go-easy-on-her profile in The New York Times Magazine, Kelly happily offers up “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”…
When you actually bother to examine Kelly’s record, it’s hard to avoid the fact that she’s really just a nicer looking Roger Ailes in a Valentino blouse…[S]he’s incredibly good at what she does, and what she does best is distract attention from the malicious misinformation Fox News peddles on a daily basis—in part by calling out the right-wing lies that are so outrageous even Fox executives cannot bring themselves to defend them. Sadly, for her fan base in the mainstream media, that’s more than enough.
