Megyn Kelly of Fox News is a train wreck and a disgrace to the tenets of quality journalism that so many of us hold sacred. Kelly, once again proved herself (before a national cable television audience) unstable, irrational, biased and hostile during a segment she hosted with ACORN National Spokesman Scott Levenson. News Hounds has a detailed account of Kelly’s actions and Levenson’s reactions during a heated interview of more than seven minutes on Fox News. If you were to run a clinic on how to smear the good name of journalism, Kelly’s interview with Levenson might be a case study in what not to do as a credible news person interested in telling only the facts and letting the people decide what they want to believe or who they choose to believe. Kelly flat out told lies and made misleading statements for much of the interview and was unwilling to hold her organization (Fox News) to the same standard she was holding ACORN (eight workers are in trouble for voter registration fraud while she was unwilling to hold Fox accountable for the misdeeds of its employees). She threatened, I think twice, to cut his mirophone off and then finally did at the end before she gave a one-sided, unchallenged and biased soliloquy about these supposed horrors committed by ACORN (not eight out of 13,000 individuals, but rather the entire organization in her book). She lacked the courage to offer her side, let him offer his side and then let the viewers decide. Instead, she placed her finger on one side of the scale to tilt the balance. It’s typical Fox News behavior. Biased individuals like Kelly blur the line between objective reporting/interviewing and offering opinion/analysis. One minute she is supposed to be objectively interviewing Bill Burton or Scott Levenson (even though she was biased and exposed as such in both interviews) and the next minute she is on Bill O’Reilly’s show offering strong opinions (strong right-wing opinions). Fox News, I believe, purposely blurs this once-sacred line due to its sharp right-wing ideological mission. If readers are confused by viewing employees like Megyn Kelly giving sharp right-leaning opinions one minute and interviewing people (supposedly as an objective journalist) then they may attribute more credibility to her opinions as being more fact-based than in fact they actually are. So, Fox uses this to fool its viewers (mostly right wingers) into thinking these strong conservative opinions (that start in the morning with Fox and Friends and run through the afternoon, late afternoon and evening through Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren) are more fact-focused and less opinion-based. It’s actually a fairly clever scheme.
News Hounds:
http://www.newshounds.us/2009/03/20/megyn_kelly_melts_down_over_acorn.php#more
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