The Other McCain

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Good-Bye, @MegynKelly

Posted on | January 4, 2017 | 2 Comments

 

Did you make the smart move? That’s the question that occurs to most Fox News viewers who have watched your meteoric ascent, as they consider your switch to NBC. Surely the network that hired you would not have done so if they thought you were a conservative. NBC News is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party. It is the network of Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow. NBC is anti-Christian and pro-Islam, anti-family and pro-abortion, anti-cop and pro-“Black Lives Matter.” The partisan and ideological biases at NBC News are so blatantly obvious that it is impossible to imagine that you, Ms. Kelly, could be permitted to broadcast anything there that would deviate from the network’s Democrat/“progressive” agenda. But anyway . . .

 

“Bill hated her” — I laughed when I read that quote from an unnamed Fox News host in Gabriel Sherman’s article. Yes, and we hate Bill O’Reilly, a guy who’s been the “face” of Fox News for way too long. Why did Roger Ailes invest so heavily in making O’Reilly the tentpole of the network, the signature of the Fox News brand? It never made sense to me. Veteran news guys like Brit Hume and Brett Baier are the best thing on the network, and in terms of opinionated conservatism, Sean Hannity is more watchable. Yet year after year, O’Reilly has remained entrenched in his 8 p.m. time slot as the centerpiece of the Fox News identity, and I could seldom stand to watch more than a few minutes of The O’Reilly Factor.

“Personnel is policy,” as the Reaganites said, and the Ailes-era staffing decisions at Fox News seemed to reflect a commitment to a particular style of Republican political messaging, namely the old Al D’Amato Long Island GOP machine and its Art Finklestein-engineered attack strategy. Attracting a large viewership in the outer suburbs of New York City made sense, as a business strategy for Fox News, and the demographics of that audience meant that having an Irish Catholic guy from Long Island as the 8 p.m. anchor also made sense. But once the network had established its national influence, didn’t Fox News limit its audience by having this snide and smarmy egotist as its most famous face?

 

Well, The Kelly Files was a counter-balance to that problem, but the gigantic ego  of Bill O’Reilly — and the network’s investment in his ego — could not be effectively counter-balanced, and so, good-bye, Megyn:

For Kelly, the jump from a primetime perch at Fox to a multifaceted role at NBC carries a high degree of risk. She’ll be giving up the most loyal audience in cable news for new set of platforms that she’ll have to largely build herself. At NBC, Kelly will anchor an Oprah-like daytime show, launch a new Sunday night news magazine, and contribute to the network’s political coverage. The track record for talented anchors launching daytime programs hasn’t been good (see: Katie Couric, Meredith Vieira, Anderson Cooper), and no Fox News star has successfully crossed over to the mainstream before.

My hunch, Ms. Kelly, is that you will simply disappear. The partisan Democrats who run NBC News have no interest in your success. What they have done is to hire you away from Fox News in order to damage their rival, and to neutralize whatever personal influence you may have had in terms of undermining liberalism’s hegemonic control of the news media. You are now another highly-paid puppet whose strings are controlled by the executives at 30 Rock, and if you fail at NBC — if your daytime show is a ratings flop — those executives will have no problem paying out your contract while limiting your airtime to occasional appearances as a Meet the Press panelist.

 

Of course, I’ve been wrong before. A month before Election Day, I declared that the devastation of Trump’s accumulating scandals meant he couldn’t possibly win and, if I was wrong about that, maybe I’m also wrong about your career prospects at NBC News. How could you succeed?

  1. Be pro-life — The pro-abortion bias is arguably the most toxic aspect of the media’s liberal agenda. Obviously, NBC News isn’t going to let you use their airtime to promote the pro-life perspective in any blatant way, but there will be times when your decisions could have a subtle yet important influence. “Therefore choose life.”
  2. Be anti-Hollywood — My old friend Andrew Breitbart and I used to argue about which was more wicked, Hollywood or D.C. Having spent so long dealing with the two-faced backstabbing scoundrels in Washington, I was certain that D.C. was the most evil place on the planet, but Andrew was unconvinced. “No, trust me, Hollywood is worse,” he’d say, before regaling me with tales about the selfish coke-addicted perverts who run the entertainment industry. If you, Ms. Kelly, were to use your NBC daytime show to expose some of the shocking decadence of Hollywood, this would be a tremendous public service and, I suspect, would make you unique among major network news personalities.
  3. Be patriotic — What was the secret of Trump’s victory, really? First, “build a wall,” and second, “Make America great again.” This simple old-fashioned patriotism proved so popular that 63 million American voters were willing to overlook every negative aspect of Trump’s personality and politics. Maybe your NBC audience would find it refreshing to encounter a daytime show where the U.S. military and our nation’s law-enforcement officers are recognized for their heroic service to our country. Flag-waving Mom-and-apple-pie patriotism is a “brand” whose value has been unappreciated by the liberal media establishment, and you might enjoy surprising success at NBC if you make this a core theme of your new show.

Network TV stars don’t ask for my advice, and I offer it unsolicited only because it seems to me there is too much an echo-chamber mentality in the major media. People inside the news industry can never be objective about the industry and its problems. Unable to step outside the echo chamber, and unwilling to listen to anyone who isn’t part of the industry — what do they know, those stupid people who merely watch TV? — the media’s hive-mind generates a sort of impenetrable force-field that prevents insiders from seeing their industry’s problems objectively.

Maybe you, Ms. Kelly, can be an exception to that rule.

 

(Via Memeorandum.)



 

 

Category: Fox News, Media Bias, MSNBC, NBC

Comments

2 Responses to “Good-Bye, @MegynKelly”

  1. Scribes Lament: ‘Trump Owns the Day’ | Regular Right Guy
    January 5th, 2017 @ 3:03 pm

    […] Good-Bye, @MegynKelly […]

  2. McCallum, O’Reilly, Carlson and Hannity | Regular Right Guy
    January 5th, 2017 @ 3:19 pm

    […] I look for Kelly to quietly disappear after a couple years banking the indefensibly stupid amount of money NBC will pay […]