MeAgain! Megyn Kelly, Plummeting in the Ratings, Turns Back to Her Favorite Trick: Making It All About Herself

First look at the headline -- which is not NBC just juicing the piece. Those are MeAgain's first words.

You will probably be expecting her to reveal that she'd complained of Bill O'Reilly making unwanted sexual advances towards her.

But no, that's just the clickbait headline talking.

If you bother watching the clip, the complaint to which she refers was a missive to Fox executives complaining that Bill O'Reilly, by stating on CNN that he "wasn't interested" in talking about Roger Ailes' sexual harassment situation because it would tarnish the reputation of his employer FoxNews, was contributing to the "culture" at FoxNews that made it harder for women to report harassment.

Which is a point worth making -- sort of. But she twists O'Reilly's words around --
Bill O'Reilly had said that no one ever complained about his "behavior," obviously referring to sexual harassment, and MeAgain deliberately misinterprets "behavior" to mean "words he said on CNN about not wanting to talk about sexual harassment."

I can't see any other interpretation but that she willfully misread O'Reilly's words to give her old story a fresh news hook, and then cooked her own headline to give it some Harvey Weinstein style heat.

Very cynical.

What begins as a suggestion that she was harassed or molested turns into merely this -- which itself is just cribbed and old news from her dumb book Settle For More:

"I wrote [in Settle For More], in part: 'Perhaps he didn't realize the kind of message his criticism sends to young women across this country about how men continue to view the issue of speaking out about sexual harassment," Kelly said. "Perhaps he didn't realize that his exact attitude of shaming women into shutting the hell up about harassment on grounds that 'it will disgrace the company' is in part how Fox News got into the decade-long Ailes mess to begin with. Perhaps it's his own history of harassment of women which has, as you both know, resulted in payouts to more than one woman, including recently, that blinded him to the folly of saying anything other than 'I am just so sorry for the women of this company who never should have had to go through that.'"

Your headline suggested molestation; your actual complaint is about messaging.

So, so MeAgain.

I'm sure you noticed that she makes herself the Brave Hero of this story by talking up her Secret Crusade for Women.

Again, I think she has a point worth making here. Not a big one, but a point. But she cooks the everloving shit out of this fairly minor story about her complaining about O'Reilly indirectly contributing to women hypothetically feeling uncomfortable in bringing complaints forward into a headline which strongly implies that the story you're about to hear will be about Bill O'Reilly raping or assaulting her.

Nice try, MeAgain. But your schtick of attempting to parlay your endless drama into ratings failed before and it will almost certainly fail again.

That's not to say Bill O'Reilly's a charmer. He's denying it all as a "smear," but the NYTimes reports that he settled a complaint with Lis Wiehl for $32 million, and that complaint alleged "repeated harassment and a non-consensual sexual relationship."

Non-consensual like rape, or non-consensual like "date me and I'll book you on the show more?" The latter is bad -- it's harassment and a form of coercion -- but we can't be sure she's talking rape.

Anyway, O'Reilly denies this, and Lis Wiehl signed affidavits withdrawing her complaints about harassment.

Of course, she seems to have withdrawn those in connection with a $32 million payout.

A lot of people are seizing upon that number and thinking that payout that large means that something must have happened.

Which does not mean that Megyn Kelly shouldn't be called to task for her clickbait self-promotion. The endless drama of Megyn must end at some point.

Related: More Fox Drama. Laura Ingraham is allegedly "terrorizing" Fox staffers with her tantrums.

posted by Ace at 02:45 PM

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