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Megyn Kelly Tag

Last week, Wikileaks published an email from then-CNN contributor Donna Brazile, now DNC chairwoman, giving the Hillary Clinton campaign a question before a town hall event. On Wednesday night, after the presidential debate, Fox News host Megyn Kelly confronted Brazile over the email. Brazile denied she did this and quickly played victim:
MEGYN KELLY: You're accused of receiving a debate question whether a CNN town hall where they partnered with TV One that you had this question on March 12th, that verbatim, verbatim was provided by Roland Martin to CNN the next day. How did you get that question, Donna? DONNA BRAZILE: Well, Kelly, as I play straight up and with you, I did not receive any questions from CNN.

After watching the segment below, all I can say is that if you want to see an interview that's heavy on policy, look elsewhere. This was more Barbara Walters than FOX News Sunday. That's not to say it isn't interesting or worth watching, because it is. "Megyn Kelly Presents" airs on the FOX Broadcast Network and not the FOX News Channel and this makes sense for reasons which are apparent. Kelly is obviously trying to expand her reach and kicking off this effort by interviewing Trump is brilliant from a ratings perspective. The first six minutes of the segment recalls the rocky relationship between Kelly and Trump starting with the first GOP debate on FOX News in August of last year using clips from FNC and other news outlets.

Noted liberal Harvard Law School professor (retired) Alan Dershowitz was on the Kelly File last night, and repeated what he has said before via News Max): "He came into my class, literally his first day in law school with his right had up – not his left hand, his right hand," Dershowitz said Tuesday on Fox News Channel's "The Kelly File." Cruz challenged his professor on everything, which made his job easier, Dershowitz said. "I was against the death penalty, he's in favor. I was in favor of the exclusionary rule, he's against it," he said. "And he made such brilliant arguments that I never had to play the devil's advocate." Cruz "was one of the best students I ever had," Dershowitz said.

Ted Cruz has been the subject of a story by The National Enquirer alleging he had 5 mistresses. Trump supporters on social media singled out, based on barely pixelated images in the Enquirer, Amanda Carpenter for particular viciousness. She denied the story as did another woman, Trump's spokesperson Katrina Pierson. Cruz called the story garbage, but never directly committed as to whether he EVER had an affair. Cruz was interviewed by Megyn Kelly in a town hall to air tonight. The following clip was just posted as a tease for the show tonight:

The dispute between Donald Trump and Fox News has escalated rapidly today. It went from Trump was thinking about refusing to appear, to Trump likely not appearing, to the campaign saying Trump "definitely" would not appear. Megyn Kelly, the focus of Trump's ire, just announced on her show that Trump is out based on conversations Carl Cameron had with the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign apparently has released a statement to that effect. Trump Statement Fox News Debate (added) Fox News issued the following statement:

UPDATE - Everything changed in the three hours since this post. Trump campaign says he’s out of Fox News Debate (Reader Poll) Fox News just announced its stage line up for the debate Thursday night. Donald Trump is center stage. Fox News Debate 1-28-2016 Line Up Donald Trump is upset that Megyn Kelly is one of the moderators of Thursday's Fox News debate. Trump has been complaining for days, demanding she be removed. Fox News just said No. Now Trump is upping the ante, posting this Instagram video complaining of Kelly's bias:

The next Republican debate is coming up this Thursday and will be hosted by FOX News. Based on their back and forth the last time FOX News hosted, Donald Trump asked the network to take Megyn Kelly off the moderator desk. Unfortunately for Trump, the network is doing no such thing. USA Today reports:
Fox to Trump: Megyn Kelly will be a debate moderator Fox News has a message for Donald Trump: Megyn Kelly will be a moderator for next week's Republican debate, despite the businessman's call for her removal.

Oh boy, here we go---it's time to talk about this mess again. Remember back in October, when Megyn Kelly got into a fight with Donald Trump during a nationally televised debate, and everyone took a side? Remember? Was there a gotcha question involved? Was Trump disrespectful? Do we even know why we're fighting anymore? HAVE WE ALL LOST OUR MINDS?

A few years ago, liberals in politics and media insisted that rhetoric coming from the Tea Party was violent and that we needed a new tone in political discourse. Now that #BlackLivesMatter activists are openly advocating violence, those folks are nowhere to be found. Last night on FOX News, Megyn Kelly brought this double standard into focus. Josh Feldman of Mediaite has more:
Megyn Explodes: Liberals Rip Dangerous Tea Party Rhetoric But #BlackLivesMatter’s Is Fine?! Megyn Kelly really went off tonight on the hypocrisy of Democrats and liberal media figures who were quick to condemn dangerous tea party rhetoric for the 2011 Tucson shooting but are now keeping silent about dangerous rhetoric from #BlackLivesMatter protesters. After some protesters were filmed chanting “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” Kelly was amazed that not only have Democrats avoided the issue, but they’ve been recently trying to establish a connection between them and the movement.

During the first Republican presidential debate earlier this month, all hell broke loose after an exchange on the "war on women" between debate moderator Megyn Kelly and contender Donald Trump. The furor over Kelly's snark, and Trump's audacity, boiled over into a weeks-long debate between those convinced that Kelly had wrongfully attacked Trump, and those who felt like Kelly's question about Trump's tone toward women was fair. So, who won? I'm not ready to call this for either side yet (there's still plenty of time for either party to reload) but polling data suggests that as of right now, Donald Trump has come out on top over Fox News. From Public Policy Polling [emphasis mine]:
Trump is winning his fight with Megyn Kelly. When we last polled her in December of 2013 her favorability with Republicans nationally was 44/9. Her favorability is in a similar place now at 42% but her negatives have shot up to 20%, largely because she's at 20/43 with Trump's supporters.
Trumps supporters are angry about the way the debate exchange went down, and it shows.

Megyn Kelly has not only been a rising star, she is at the top of the Fox News food chain, with the possible exception of Bill O'Reilly. We explored her success -- and anti-Fox News Media Matters' frustration -- in Megyn Kelly’s success must be driving Media Matters crazy-er. Kelly had some uncomfortable on-air back and forth with Donald Trump during the first debate, particularly on the issue of how Trump treats women: That was followed by a multi-day lambasting of Kelly by Trump post-debate, including the infamous (and disputed) "blood coming out of her eyes, or wherever" comment, resulting in Trump being uninvited from the RedState annaual gathering:

Kate Steinle was killed by an illegal immigrant who had been deported at least 5 times and had a lengthy criminal record. That's an inconvenient fact for the Obama administration, apparently, because unlike in numerous other cases of interracial violence, for Kate Steinle the President had no words of comfort. Megyn Kelly made that point, and it is devastating: Here was White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest two days ago when asked about sanctuary cities. Can you find an actual answer in his answers?

You may recall the horrific story of Colleen Hufford, a 54 year-old Oklahoma woman who was beheaded in 2014 by a co-worker who was a recent convert to Islam. The story shocked the nation and reminded many of the Fort Hood attack; some people insisted it wasn't terrorism but just an act of workplace violence. Holly Bailey of Yahoo News reported at the time:
A beheading in Oklahoma: Was it terrorism or workplace violence? She never saw him coming, according to police. Just after 4 p.m. on Sept. 25, Colleen Hufford, a 54-year-old grandmother and worker at Vaughan Foods in Moore, Okla., was standing in the doorway of the front office in the food processing facility's main building when Alton Nolen, a co-worker who had just been suspended over an argument with another colleague, violently grabbed her from behind. As horrified employees watched, Nolen, a 30-year-old production line worker with a criminal history, savagely sawed at Hufford's throat with a large kitchen knife he had gone home to retrieve, severing her head.

Harvard Professor Emeritus, Alan Dershowitz, joined Fox News' Megyn Kelly last night to discuss charges filed against Baltimore law enforcement officers in the Freddie Gray case. Kelly addressed speculation about bias in prosecutor Marilyn Mosby's public statements and then gave the floor to Dershowitz. "If you're the prosecutor, you have to be concerned about doing justice for everybody -- not just for the victim, not just for the family of the victim, not just for the youth of Baltimore, but also for the accused, for the policemen who have been accused and may have been scapegoated," Dershowitz explained. Recognizing Mosby's intent was likely to "quell the riots," something she did with relative success, Derschowitz said, "but you can't sacrifice individual defendants to the need to stop riots. Imagine jurors who are going to sit now in Baltimore and say, if we acquit these defendants, our houses might get burned down, our stores will be attacked, our children won't be safe."

Remember that one time when a professional journalist called the United States Attorney General a duck, and then asked him to quack? In public? While the camera was rolling? There are no more words. Just watch: I'M SO UNCOMFORTABLE.

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 Moment Kelly, 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.