"For Megyn Kelly, however, the shackles are off. She’s an astounding figure these days ..."

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FOX NEWS, A MELODRAMA
This year, there was no better view of the meteor hitting the Republican Party in real time.
By Emily Nussbaum, October 30, 2016

Full disclosure: late one night, while watching Fox News, I donated two hundred and fifty dollars to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. My husband is Canadian. I’m Jewish. In the early nineties, my dad worked in the Clinton White House, but although I love him we are not political clones.

My bias, in sum, is as blatant as a Celtic arm tattoo. My first real encounter with Fox News came during the second Bush Administration, when my nearly blind grandmother listened to Bill O’Reilly at high volume. An immigrant garment worker widowed by a union organizer, she slowly tipped from left to neocon, which happens a lot among your elderly New York Jews who watch Fox. We had a few arguments, over the years, about whether anti-Semitism persisted in America or whether my grandmother was being paranoid. Were she still around, she’d win that one.

But, these days, it’s me watching Fox. I’ve got the iPhone app; I like to watch the eerie border crossing, late in the evening, from Megyn Kelly to Sean Hannity. During previous elections, I never watched cable news, left or right, or the Sunday shouting shows—although I knew that, for many people, they were TV. In 2016, I watched them all. Fox became my chief vice, less for the news than for the melodrama—there was no better view of the meteor hitting the Republican Party in real time.

It’s hard to believe that it was a mere three months ago, in July, that Fox’s founding C.E.O., Roger Ailes, who had run the network since 1996, was ousted for sexual harassment on such a baroque scale that Alfred Hitchcock would be impressed. The investigative journalist Gabriel Sherman exposed him, but it was Ailes’s female anchors who turned against him: first, Gretchen Carlson, then, more important, Megyn Kelly, his most dazzling hire. With his hefty payoff, Ailes scurried to the Trump campaign, where, for a while, he acted as a shadow adviser. Now the survivors of that scandal were forced to debate Trump’s alleged pussy-grabbing. Never Trumpers and Always Trumpers were seated side by side.

And Fox itself had quite suddenly become the put-upon establishment, needled by online punks like Breitbart and Alex Jones—open purveyors of Trutherism and birtherism, uninterested in even the icing of “fair and balanced.” Trump, who retweeted white supremacists and hired Breitbart’s Steve Bannon, was their pick. As his polls cratered, rumors emerged that his endgame wasn’t the Presidency at all: it was Trump TV. Which brings us to last week, when that institution seemed to have a soft launch on Facebook Live. The very next night, Newt Gingrich growled at Megyn Kelly that she was “fascinated with sex” and, in a rage, compared the big three networks to Pravda and accused Kelly’s own show of outrageous bias. The clip went viral—just as Kelly began to renegotiate her contract, seeking more than twenty million dollars a year.

Rarely does anybody on Fox address these behind-the-scene tensions that directly, of course—the closest anyone has come was some sniping on Twitter between Megyn Kelly and Sean Hannity, in which he claimed that She was with Her. On news panels, anchors focus primarily on WikiLeaks, each presented as a shocking scoop but given little context. To be fair, that’s not solely Fox’s problem but a larger issue on TV news, still reliant as it is on what Neil Postman once called “simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical, and noncontextual” visual techniques (and, these days, curated tweets). Still, watching Fox did help me decode Trump’s debate tangents, since much of what he says is shorthand, with code words—Project Veritas, Sidney Blumenthal—used as hyperlinks to stories that he assumes his audience has already absorbed. The TV critic Todd VanDerWerff once compared the Fox format to ABC’s “Lost”: you need to immerse yourself entirely to grok the breadth of its world-building paranoias and mythologies.

Ostensibly, there are two Fox divisions: news journalists, who ask follow-up questions and include diverse guests; and pure ideologues, like the mad king Hannity. For a newbie, the border can seem awfully porous, since everyone uses the desk, the glasses, the head tilt—the ancient theatre of TV authority. In the aftermath of the third debate, these two types were united in genuine pride at the well-reviewed performance of Chris Wallace, the first Fox anchor to moderate a Presidential debate. Megyn Kelly kvelled that it was a “Fox News fair-and-balanced debate, for our critics,” adding, “You should really tick off both sides—then you know you’re doing well.” On Mediabuzz, Wallace called his selection a statement by “the Commission on Presidential Debates—a blue-ribbon panel—that they thought that Fox was a legitimate news organization, that I was a legitimate journalist.”

It was impossible not to feel empathy for Wallace—and, in fact, his show does come closest to that model, with research-based questions and an air of healthy skepticism. But, as Hannity argues, shows like his pay the bills. And watching Hannity and O’Reilly feels like being trapped in a sauna with a bunch of alter kockers smoking cigars, as Rudy Giuliani shouts for ever hotter applications of steam. Hannity’s buddies (primarily men, though Laura Ingraham stops by occasionally) resolutely insist that Trump has crushed every debate; he won’t ever have to concede, they say, because he’s definitely, certainly winning. There is no breaking into this mutually consoling bubble world, fuelled by imaginary polls.

O’Reilly is a stranger and sloppier force—and, of late, he’s started tiptoeing away from Trump, with an arrogant-uncle “I never said that!” bluster. Someone has clearly trolled the host by telling him that he looks good against neon blue. Half the screen is covered by maroon-and-purple stripes, and, often, a neon-yellow “alert” scrolls across the right-hand corner, unconnected to any news.

Amid this cacophony, Geraldo Rivera was recently the voice of reason. When O’Reilly’s other guests crowed that Hillary was universally loathed, that Trump would win a “tight race,” Rivera gingerly suggested that female voters might be swayed by the “Access Hollywood” tapes. O’Reilly and Eric Bolling, a host of Fox’s “The Five,” shouted him down, calling it “this salacious business.” Later, Lou Dobbs arrived. “The ‘rigged’ thing is one of the brightest things that he could’ve done,” Dobbs insisted, calling Trump’s refusal to say that he would concede if he lost “an absolute stroke of genius.” At first, Trump’s reply at the debate had seemed shocking, even on Fox. By the end of the week, it was normalized, a mere matter of strategy—would it win votes?

For Megyn Kelly, however, the shackles are off. She’s an astounding figure these days, a happy Valkyrie with amused eyes and a stiletto tucked into her rhetorical boot. Her blond hair is slicked to the side, cyborg style, every dress she wears looks like a ruby shield, and she’s got the advantage of the ultra-beautiful: she is gorgeous enough so that sexist insults rebound off her as envy. It’s Kelly who pulled the sword from the stone in this election, with that question in the first Republican primary debate, when she wondered how Donald Trump would react to criticism of his sexist insults, then listed them. We know the answer to that question now.

For a long time, however, it was Kelly at the center of the firestorm, as her predatory boss negotiated with the misogynist Trump—who had called her a “bimbo” with blood “coming out of her wherever”—over what role she might play in the election coverage. You don’t have to like or agree with Kelly to imagine what that experience might have been like: maybe only Hillary could imagine the professional ordeal, or the compromises that survival requires.

Either way, Kelly has emerged as an unlikely feminist warrior purified by her struggle to say things that no one else will. She’s always had a sense of humor and a native feeling for drama: among liberals, she’s most famous for her hilarious strut into the Fox “decision room” on Election Night in 2012, when she had the nerve to ask Karl Rove, “Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better, or is this real?” These days, she’s the network’s resident expert on Trump’s sexual-assault accusations, conversant with each development. It makes sense: in college, she helped investigate faculty sexual-harassment cases; later, she made her name debunking the Duke lacrosse case. Although she never mentions her own experience, a sense of legitimacy hovers over her: she’s the sole female anchor, during an election haunted by the gender gap, free to admit that misogyny exists. One night, she did a sweet homage to her recently deceased “nana,” a montage that included the line “She came into this world when women couldn’t vote—and went out as the country considers electing its first female President.” Then her prime-time hour ended and Hannity’s began.

In one of my favorite showdowns, Kelly faced off against Katrina Pierson—one of the legion of female Trump surrogates, from the mercenary Kellyanne Conway to the pinwheel-eyed Scottie Nell Hughes. The two women discussed the aftermath of Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape, which Kelly, unlike other anchors, continues to replay. Both stayed calm, as if in a surreal chill-off. “Will you tell me, why would this woman, at great harm to herself, come out eleven years later and make an accusation like this, and make it up out of whole cloth?” Kelly began, laying out the People reporter’s accusations. Pierson did her thing, giving denials, but Kelly cut in, reading damning excerpts. “Mr. Trump has denied this,” Pierson said. “I take him at his word for this.” “Well, why don’t you take him at his word on the bus, where he said he does do this?” Kelly asked.

But, really, the segment was about Kelly’s face, and her brutal serenity, as Pierson attempted to switch the topic to Hurricane Matthew. When interviewees go loud, Kelly goes soft. She never made a face at Pierson—only Anderson Cooper, on CNN, rivals her arctic deadpan—but her eyes lowered slightly, the corners of her mouth rose, and her suspicion became visible, glimmering under the surface. It was hard even to remember to look at Pierson.

Yes, I know. Kelly has her own record. A colleague begged me, “Please don’t let her off the hook”—and I do realize that I’m hardly the first naïve liberal to make Kelly into the Lucy Van Pelt to our Charlie Brown, holding out the football of fair journalism. Kelly was behind the New Black Panthers nonsense; she touted the “War on Christmas.” She employs the same “gotchas” as her peers: one night, she framed a WikiLeaks exchange about Catholicism, in which Catholic Democrats talked critically about the faith, as a primo scandal, then shouted down a liberal talking head who tried to point out that their skeptical perspective was shared by many American Catholics. But Kelly’s air of mischief is disarming. She ended that ugly segment, sorority style, with a shouted goodbye to her guest: “Love ya! Mean it.”

The night of the third debate, Kelly was aglow. Like her colleagues, she suggested that Trump hadn’t done too badly. But then she destroyed his weakling advocate Jason Miller. She pivoted left and surgically interrogated Donna Brazile about WikiLeaks, leaving even this biased liberal wanting an actual answer.

I looked into Kelly’s eyes and tried to read them like tarot cards, discerning her contractual options. Would she hop to CNN? Or was she the future of Fox? Could Hannity follow Trump into the upside-down and leave Kelly as the dominant cable force, rewriting Ailes’s legacy in her feminine image—the ultimate revenge? Maybe it’s karma that President Hillary Clinton might yet be savaged by a female Fox journalist who survived a boss battle with Donald Trump. Sisterhood is powerful. ♦
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