By breaking this week with a number of her colleagues over a controversial “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly demonstrated again why she is sometimes referred to as the network’s “independent” voice.
She also likely revealed why her show easily outperforms her competitors, both at Fox News and elsewhere.
“So private citizens shouldn’t do offensive things, even behind closed doors now, lest they cause offense,” she said Thursday. “We don’t compromise America’s bedrock principles just to make other nations like us more.”
Of the few Fox personalities to defend first the free speech rights of the group that hosted the contest, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, Kelly is perhaps the most passionate and outspoken.
True, Kelly is joined by a handful of the network’s hosts and contributors, including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, in defending AFDI’s right to intentionally provocative speech, but it is she who is issuing headline-grabbing monologues while also arguing the topic face-to-face with some of her colleagues.
“[W]e have heard the event organizers condemned as being too provocative, too stupid, even for inviting their own attempted murder,” she said Wednesday evening. “If this is where American sentiment stands on this issue, then the jihadis are officially winning.”
The AFDI contest, which was set up to award $10,000 to the cartoonists who best lampooned Muhammad, nearly came under a terrorist attack Sunday evening. As the event came to a close, two heavily armed would-be terrorists, Nadir Soofi, 34, and Elton Simpson, 30, approached the venue.
Luckily for the contest’s nearly 200 attendees, the event was protected by heavily armed guards. The two jihad-inspired assailants were quickly shot and killed before they could do any real damage.
In a debate Monday evening with Bill O’Reilly, who has argued all week that AFDI was wrong to “provoke” jihad-minded terrorists, Kelly said, “You know what else the jihadis don’t like? They hate Jews. Should we get rid of all Jews? That’s the path we’re going to go down if we start catering to the jihadis.”
“There’s no satisfying them. There’s no making them happy. You can’t not do things because the jihadis are going to be upset,” she said.
Although two wannabe jihadis nearly murdered hundreds of Americans, much of media’s focus since the thwarted terrorist attack has been on Geller and so-called “hate speech.”
For Kelly, this is a nonsense narrative.
“There may be a time and place to discuss whether this kind of discourse is helpful to our country, to our fight with the jihadis and so on. But within hours of an attempted murder of the very folks under attack, the reaction is, ‘Well, you asked for it,'” she said Wednesday.
She again reaffirmed that everyone in the U.S. has the right to speak his mind, regardless of content.
“[T]he rest of society can condemn this group’s speech as a matter of decorum, but how about waiting a beat until the crime scene has been cleared?” she asked.
Kelly’s vocal support for the free speech rights of Geller and the AFDI contrasts sharply with many of her Fox colleagues, including Greta Van Susteren, Geraldo Rivera and Martha MacCallum, who’ve gone out of their way to condemn the group’s intentionally provocative acts.
“Just because you have a right to do something, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do,” said MacCallum.
Van Susteren scolded the AFDI for endangering the lives of law enforcement officials.
But for Fox News’s ratings queen, these criticisms are beside the point.
Kelly’s willingness to oppose her colleagues likely does more than just lend to her tag as an “independent” voice. Her eagerness to break with many of her coworkers could also explain her impressive ratings.
Ever since Fox put her in its primetime lineup, Kelly has “rocked,” carving out a place for herself in the evening lineup as a tough, free-thinker, according to the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple and a recent New York Times profile.
Also, since her move to primetime, Kelly has sparred with O’Reilly with greater frequency, with the two regularly hosting one another for spirited debates.
These often tense one-on-one events are now expected from Kelly, even as the network’s top brass continue to run a very tight ship, monitoring closely disputes between its on-air talent and all criticism directed at its multi-million dollar empire.
The move to position Kelly as primetime’s tough, independent thinker appears to have paid off: She is not just popular with media, but she plays extremely well with the all-important 25-to-54-year-old demographic.
This is important to watch as she continues to carve out a spot for herself at the extremely lucrative and successful cable news network.
Fox hosts like O’Reilly and Sean Hannity enjoy terrific ratings when stacked against competition with other networks. However, unlike Kelly, who, again, bests everyone in the 25-to-54-year-old category, their respective audiences aren’t getting any younger.
In December 2014, for example, the New York Times reported that the “median age for Mr. O’Reilly’s audience reached a new high, 72.1.”
Compare Kelly’s young, growing audience and her soaring popularity to her primetime colleagues and a picture emerges: The outspoken, “independent” anchor who enjoys phenomenal ratings, is not just a new force at Fox News — she is the force at Fox News.
