Did you think it was impossible for the Times to say something nice about anyone at FOX News?
I did too, until I read this column by Jim Rutenberg:
The Megyn Kelly MomentKelly, who is now 44, grew up in Ailes’s America, in a middle-class suburb of Albany called Delmar. She was the youngest of three children, worked as a fitness instructor and went to Mass most Sundays. Her father was an education professor at the State University of New York at Albany, and her mother ran the behavioral-health department at a Veterans Administration hospital. As a teenager in the late 1980s, she lived in a mall rat’s bubble of tall hair, leg warmers and Bon Jovi; one of the popular kids, she was the type who also had friends among the other groups at Bethlehem Central High School, with names like the Dirties (hackeysack-playing stoners) and the Creamies (choir geeks).Reality intruded early. Ten days before Christmas, when Kelly was 15, her father died of a heart attack. He had canceled some of his life-insurance coverage just two months earlier. Money had been tight, and Kelly’s mother had to worry about the mortgage and other expenses. In her senior yearbook, Megyn listed her future hopes in three words: “College, government, wealth.”Kelly took a high-school aptitude test that, in a perhaps rare moment of accuracy for such tests, suggested that her ideal career was news. She applied to Syracuse in hopes of attending its well-regarded communications program; she was accepted to the school but rejected from the program, so she majored in political science instead.
It’s a very long piece but worth reading in full.
Of course, not everyone on the left is happy about Kelly’s success.
As Professor Jacobson wrote in 2013, Media Matters was panicked by her rising career:
Media Matters: Be afraid of Megyn Kelly, be very afraidWe don’t actually know that Megyn Kelly is replacing Sean Hannity, even if the Drudge scoop is true that Kelly is taking the 9 p.m. slot at Fox News. Hannity may be moving to another prime time slot, or there may be some out-of-the-box schedule other than 1 hour slots per person.But Media Matters is not waiting to find out, it’s sounding the alarm about how devious Roger Ailes is in promoting Kelly, Megyn Kelly, Sean Hannity, And What Fox News’ “Course Correction” Really Means
In the New York Times piece, Ms. Kelly addressed the Media Matters issue:
When Kelly got her 9 p.m. show, Media Matters sounded an alarm, calling her “a much more pernicious purveyor of political propaganda” than other Fox News stars, with a unique ability to “pluck misinformation and imbue it with a veneer of legitimacy.” (She ignores Media Matters, she says: “They exist to destroy Fox News.”)
The folks at Media Matters may think they matter but Megyn Kelly is having the last laugh.
Good for her.
Featured image via the Huffington Post.
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