NBC’s Megyn Kelly may be getting kudos for the hit job she did on Father’s Day for InfoWars host Alex Jones. But the ratings are weak. Even America’s Funniest Home Videos and a CBS “60 Minutes” rerun beat her out Sunday night. Lefty Think Progress called it a “ratings catastrophe.”
Her number: 3.5 million viewers. It’s her lowest since her new show Megyn Kelly Tonight began three weeks ago.
CNN’s Brian Stelter called Jones a “virus.”
“What’s different about this, about this hate-monger, this conspiracy theorist?” Stelter asked on Sunday’s Reliable Sources. “I wonder if what is different, Charlie, is that the country feels very anxious right now, obviously very divided, as we have been talking about, and Alex Jones is a virus. There’s maybe a fear of spreading that virus more fully on a big network like the National Broadcasting Company.”
What Kelly shouldn’t be praised for are the lies she told Jones in her persuasive ass-kissy story pitch.
Before Sunday’s program, Jones called her “Medusa” and venomously ran what Kelly had to think were private phone calls in which she repeatedly claimed her story would not be a “gotcha” piece. “I don’t double-cross,” she insisted. She wanted to get to know HIM. She told him in the end he’d be fine with what she did. She wanted people to come away thinking how “interesting” he is, just another father and not the boogeyman they’d imagined him to be.
She said she was particularly moved by his custody battle — so moved that she ran absolutely nothing about it in her Father’s Day Massacre.
“I really just want to talk about you,” Kelly told him. “You know, YOU.”
Except the truth is, Sunday’s segment was entirely negative and obviously “gotcha” in nature.
The “YOU” we got to know was Jones, sweating and defensive about saying that the Sandy Hook killings were a hoax and the Comet Ping Pong Pizza scandal — that Democrats were running a child sex ring out of various places such as a Washington pizzeria — is to be believed.
She also showed him apologizing on air to Chobani yogurt to avoid a lawsuit.
He said that the company’s Idaho factory, “which employs refugees, was connected to the 2016 sexual assault of a child and a rise in tuberculosis cases.”
Kelly got a lot of flack even before the interview aired from people and a few advertisers who didn’t think Jones was worthy of an interview. She explained in her interview that Jones has President Trump‘s ear and had amassed a large following during the recent presidential election.
But that was about the only positive thing she said about him — and it was more of menacing warning.