During her recent interview on “BBC Newsnight” — a segment the outlet has since mostly deleted from its Twitter account — political analyst and podcast host Megyn Kelly placed a portion of the blame for the Jan. 6 riot inside the U.S. Capitol on the mainstream media.
News outlets like CNN, she argued, long ago abandoned objectivity as a consequence of their complete and total disdain for former President Donald Trump.
“I remember listening to all of [Trump’s] disparaging comments about CNN when he first became a national figure as a presidential candidate, and I watched a lot of CNN, even though I was on Fox [News]. And I was like, ‘This is unfair. CNN may be a little boring, but it is fair. It’s factual, and it’s not biased against Trump.’ And then they spent the next four years proving him right — proving me wrong.”
“They hated him so much, they checked their objectivity,” Kelly continued. “And it wasn’t just CNN — all of them did. They just couldn’t check their own personal feelings about him. Either that, or they signed onto what I call the ‘Jorge Ramos Theory’ of covering Trump.”
The former Fox News host went on to explain that Ramos, a Univision news anchor, argued during the 2016 presidential election that journalists needed to cover Trump by calling him “a racist, sexist, misogynist” because doing so would be “important for history.”
“I think too many journalists agreed with that, at their own peril,” explained Kelly. “Part of the reason we saw what happened on the Capitol here two weeks ago was because there’s been a complete lack of trust — a destruction of trust — in the media, and people don’t know where to turn for true information. They don’t trust the media anymore, and it’s a major problem.”
Kelly went on to chide conservative outlets for not being “skeptical enough” in their coverage of Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud.
“You’ve gotta cover it, because the president’s making the claims,” she said. “You can cover it skeptically. I think that was missing in too many places. But I do think what happened on the left was — the reason you had people going to the Capitol, not the outside protesters but the ones who went in and rioted and hurt people — how did those people get the point where they really believed it?”
The BBC anchor then interrupted Kelly, preventing her from finishing her thought.
One could guess, though, where she was going. In January 2020, the “Megyn Kelly Show” host shredded the Fourth Estate, describing it as “broken” to HBO host Bill Maher.
“The media is so messed up,” she said at the time. “It’s disheartening to me, and I’ve felt this way for a long time — not just since Trump. And I know Trump’s rhetoric is too strong — ‘Enemy of the people’ and all that, and I know why he says it. There [are] still amazing journalists out there doing great work, but the media is so completely biased.”
Kelly is tapping into where the majority of Americans are today.
According to annual Edelman data shared with Axios last week, 56% of Americans said they agree that journalists and reporters “are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.” In addition, 58% said they believe “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political passion than with informing the public.”
Edelman then re-surveyed Americans after the election. The firm found 57% of Democrats said they trust the media. Only 18% of Republicans said the same.