What NBC's Alex Jones Interview Says About Megyn Kelly
The thing about marriages of convenience is that the people in them are frequently inconvenienced. That's what happens when you put money over compatibility and shared values, assuming values are even present to begin with. Sooner or later, someone is going to embarrass someone.
Megyn Kelly's interview last night with unhinged conspiracy peddler Alex Jones threatened to be one of those times, especially coming on heels of her softball sit-down with Vladimir Putin. The backlash, as such things always seem to be now, was fierce and preemptive. Kelly was accused of "normalizing" Jones, the man responsible for such timeless postulates as 9/11 was an inside job, Sandy Hook was a hoax and Democrats ran a child sex ring out of a D.C. pizza joint. Advertisers dropped out. A Connecticut affiliate refused to air the show. The Sandy Hook Promise gala fundraiser coordinators disinvited Kelly as their host.
NBC took the point. As the network reportedly scrambled to re-edit the interview, Jones released a tape of his pre-show conversation with Kelly, in which she expressed her desire to make their sit-down "fun" and show "the left" another side of his execrable personality. She also promised not to make him into "some kind of bogeyman." By the time it aired, the interview had been transformed into a sober warning on the dangers of letting liars have platforms. Kelly introduced Jones as "a radical conspiracy theorist" and a liar. She acknowledged the backlash upfront, saying, "Some thought we shouldn't broadcast this interview because his baseless allegations aren't just offensive, they're dangerous." She then justified the broadcast by pointing out that "Alex Jones isn't going away" and his audience is only getting bigger, emboldened by the open support of the president, who has consistently praised Jones and appears to rely on him for information – echoing things the radio host says in his own speeches, granting InfoWars a temporary White House press pass and recently including a link to one of the site's articles in an email to staff.
Framed this way – as a report on the dangerous liar who has the ear of the president – the segment felt relevant, even slyly subversive. After all, to shed light on Alex Jones's operation, which she summed up as "garbage in, garbage out" is to shed light on Trump's inner world. And given how low the expectations and how loud the alarm, the whole thing came off as rather anticlimactically level-headed and justified. The segment was capped by a Tom Brokaw essay on the breakdown of civil discourse on the Internet, and what are we to do. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the interview was how the whole thing functioned like an ouroboros of for-profit news media, closing the bottom-line circle by eating its own tail. The resulting piece was a marvel of having your cake, eating it, too, and covering your ass after having had your fill.
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