NBC host Megyn Kelly forced Elle to fact-check itself in the middle of an interview this week.
Kelly’s sit down with the fashion magazine, slated to focus on her new morning show, turned tense as Elle writer Mattie Kahn pushed the former Fox News anchor into a line of questioning on President Trump. Kahn brought up ESPN host Jemele Hill, whose decision to call Trump a white supremacist drove the president to call for an apology.
Kelly argued Hill didn’t have to “get political.”
“I think there’s definitely a question about whether anybody working in a news organization should take an open political position. Do you disagree with that?” Kelly asked.
Kahn, whose interview was actually a good read overall, replied: “I guess I think that there’s a blurring of the lines now between a political position and a sense that when the President of United States says that some neo-Nazis are ‘very fine people,’ you get pushed into [speaking out].”
Kelly didn’t let that assertion slide, retorting, “I’m not going to get into defending the President. You should go back and quote him directly if you’re going to do that. I’m not going to defend him or not defend him, but that quote you just gave me was wrong.”
In the edited transcript of the interview published online, Elle sought to clarify that reference to Trump’s now-infamous “very fine people” line. The magazine inserted the following paragraph in brackets directly beneath Kelly’s response, providing a more accurate version of the quote, but in the most favorable way possible to their writer. (Emphasis added.)
On Tuesday, August 15, 2017, Trump asserted that there “were very fine people on both sides” of the violence in Charlottesville. The remarks were widely criticized, with dozens of Republican elected officials and several prominent business leaders speaking out against his apparent suggestion of equivalence between the factions. Meanwhile, David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, thanked Trump on Twitter for his “courage to tell the truth.”
To be clear, Trump’s quote was ridiculous, but he never contended “some neo-Nazis” are “very fine people,” as Kahn casually stated. In fact, the line came in rebuttal to a reporter saying, “The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest –”
Trump actually jumped in to push back on that notion the protesters in Charlottesville were all neo-Nazis. “Excuse me, excuse me,” he replied. “They didn’t put themselves — and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides,” going on to add, “You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”
Moments earlier in the press conference he also said: “[N]ot all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee.”
Yes, this looks a lot like splitting hairs. But there’s a major difference between what Trump actually said and what the interviewer presented matter-of-factly as his quote.
Trump argued the protesters who weren’t neo-Nazis were the “very fine people” on that side of the statue dispute. Like Kahn, I still don’t think he should have made those comments, and they could have been framed much better, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay for journalists to misrepresent what he said.
Less-shrewd interviewees than Kelly would have let that misrepresentation slide, but she caught it and forced Elle to provide a (slightly) more fair presentation of Trump’s quote smack in the middle of its own article.
At NBC, Kelly has deliberately positioned herself to step back from political debates, which is unfortunate because her best moments as a journalist have come in scenarios just like this one, where she identifies inaccuracies and keeps important conversations factual.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
