Journalist Megyn Kelly suggested on her podcast Monday that the media’s hatred of former President Donald Trump and his supporters played a role in the rise of “conspiracy theories” that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol.
“Over the past four years and certainly over the past few months, we have seen zero effort to understand Trump’s core supporters,” Kelly said during her monologue. “The media and the Democrats hate them and it shows. And I understand, there’s political differences, but the media’s supposed to be an impartial arbitrator.”
“The media’s not supposed to let their own opinion infiltrate their reporting because it’s important for people on both sides of the aisle trust you,” she added. “But the media has surrendered to their hate for Donald Trump and for MAGA at large. The ‘Patriots,’ as they call themselves, are loathed by the press.” (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Megyn Kelly Broke Free Of Corporate Media. Now She’s Giving Them Hell)
LISTEN:
“There’s no willingness to take a hard look at how we got here…”@MegynKelly‘s monologue on the erosion of trust in the media, that led to Trump supporters believing “conspiracy theories.” Listen below, download the FULL episode here: https://t.co/F96HgI7HIW pic.twitter.com/ZKF1M0Yn29
— The Megyn Kelly Show (@MegynKellyShow) February 2, 2021
Kelly continued on to make the argument that the media’s push to dismiss all Trump voters as “racists, bigots, xenophobes, transphobes, misogynists” and more fueled the fire for the Jan. 6 riot. Some of the former president’s supporters rioted and ultimately broke into the Capitol in Washington, D.C., as lawmakers were voting to certify the electoral college votes for President Joe Biden.
“It does no good, right? It does a lot of harm,” Kelly said. “You would think, maybe, the media would ask themselves, ‘How do we … lose so many of the people who were there that day? How could we do a better job of reaching them instead of mocking them? How could we become an acceptable option for them, so that they could here what we … deem to be facts?’ You would think they’d stop to ask that, and you would be wrong.”
“The media seems content to judge these people as ‘untethered loons’ without ever pausing to to ask, ‘Did we play any role in forcing them away from our newsrooms?'” she continued.
In a post-Capitol riot news cycle, the condemnation of all Trump voters has “only gotten worse,” Kelly pointed out.
The former Fox News anchor has called out the media as having a role to play in the Capitol riot before. In January, Kelly pointed to “a complete lack of trust” in the media as “part of the reason we saw what happened on the Capitol.”
“People don’t know where to turn for true information, They don’t trust the media anymore, and it’s a major problem,” she said at the time.
