An increasingly rare non knee jerk article from Politico.The censorious powers of the heckler’s veto have evolved now to the point that people are willing to call for the banning and shunning of works of journalism not yet published. Former Fox News Channel and current NBC News anchor Megyn Kelly got the treatment this week as news of her Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly interview with Infowars mainspring Alex Jones, well before it was scheduled to air June 18, made the rounds. At least the Ayatollah Khomeini waited for the publication of Satanic Verses before he issued a fatwa ordering the murder of its author, Salman Rushdie.
Sandy Hook Elementary families implored NBC News to dump the segment because Jones has called the Newtown, Connecticut, school killings a hoax—by actors, not real people—designed, Jones said, to encourage new gun control laws. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio concurred, writing, “Pull the segment.” The NBC affiliate in nearby Hartford refused to air the episode because the “wounds of that day that have yet to heal.” Fleeing from the controversy, advertiser JPMorgan Chase dropped its spots from the show, and the usual voices damned Kelly for giving Jones “a platform.”
Not to be outshone, Jones performed some culture jamming of his own, releasing his own secretly recorded audio of the pre-interview in which Kelly buttered him up. “It’s not going to be some gotcha hit piece, I can promise you that,” Kelly told Jones on the tape. Predictably, Jones made his own call for a boycott, tweeting, “I’m calling for @megynkelly to cancel the airing of our interview for misrepresenting my views on Sandy Hook.”
When Kelly’s show finally aired, she took the mendacious Jones apart in such a textbook manner you had to wonder what all the shouting had been about. The Jones pattern, she said at the segment’s top, is making “reckless accusations followed by equivocations and excuses” when questioned. The two best examples of this are his promotion of the “Pizzagate“ lies about a satanic child porn ring and his wild allegation that Chobani was “importing Migrant Rapists,” as Infowars hyped its report on Twitter. In both cases, lawsuits have forced Jones to retract and apologize for airing these dishonest stories, and yet in conversation with Kelly he still hedges and quibbles like a con artist in an effort to have his conspiracy pizza and keep his yogurt, too. Likewise with the pathetic claims about the Sandy Hook killings. He’s still throwing the see-through drapery of devil’s advocacy to blur the fact that on most subjects he’s talking out of his tinfoil hat.
More:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/18/megyn-kelly-pantses-alex-jones-215279
