For the past 150 consecutive months, Fox News has ruled the ratings roost, being the most watched news program on cable television. For the grand majority of those years, Bill O’Reilly has led the charge for the “fair and balanced” news station. However, O’Reilly has a new challenger, and she shows no signs of holding back.
For the second time in her show’s existence, Megyn Kelly has surpassed Bill O’Reilly in the cable news wars, bringing in 413,000 viewers in the 25-54 age demographic compared to O’Reilly’s 402,000. This past week was the first time Kelly had directly beaten O’Reilly, however, as her previous victory came when O’Reilly had someone else filling his chair.
Megyn Kelly now rated #1 on all of Cable news, ahead of O'Reilly..She is a much more aggressive interviewer, I like her style #fnc
— Ed (@EDinCali) July 2, 2014
If one has not tuned into Fox News to watch The Kelly File, one may be confused as to how a woman on a conservative media station has risen to such prominence in less than a year. The answer lies in Kelly’s aggressive beliefs and on-screen personality.
In a recent interview with former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers, Kelly held no punches, asking Ayers questions many would never dream to utter in such a politically correct age, such as “How many bombings are you responsible for?” and “What would it take to make you bomb this country again?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53R8ky14VKA
While Kelly could have never expected to get the answers she wanted from Ayers, she was able to twist the interview to something useful for Fox News – a slam piece against Barack Obama. Throughout the interview, Kelly constantly hearkened back to the supposed relationship between Bill Ayers and Barack Obama in Chicago during the 60’s and 70’s, despite the fact that both men deny having a close relationship at any point in time. Kelly also seemingly wanted to insinuate a friendly relationship between Obama and al Qaeda, referring to Ayers as both Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler during the interview.
I think Megyn Kelly's interview with Bill Ayers is going to seriously hurt Obama's chances of getting elected in 2008.
— Frank Conniff (@FrankConniff) July 2, 2014
Kelly’s tactics aren’t reserved for strictly political issues, however. Recently, she also attacked Sandra Fluke for her comments on the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby case.
On MSNBC Sunday night, Fluke told Chris Matthews that “What this [the Hobby Lobby ruling] is really about at its base is trying to figure out as many ways as possible to limit women’s access to reproductive healthcare.” Apparently, Kelly did not appreciate Fluke’s statement, going on a diatribe defending the stance of Hobby Lobby and its owners:
She [Fluke] doesn’t know what she’s talking about… So it’s a lot of corporations that could be affected, but only those who feel strongly about their religious beliefs. Those folks aren’t going to have to provide abortion-related drugs: drugs that terminate an already-fertilized egg. That’s the only — out of 20 birth-control drugs that are available, they still have to cover 16. They just said we don’t want to fund those forms of birth control that end a fertilized egg…
Women were buying their own [birth control]; for the past 20 years and beyond, they’ve been buying their own. And then what happened was we passed Obamacare. And then Kathleen Sebelius had some of her HHS minions go down in the basement and write a regulation that said as part of Obamacare, you have to cover 20 out of 20 birth-control drugs — 20 out of 20.
And then women like Sandra Fluke started saying, ‘I’m entitled. Oh my God, I didn’t realize how victimized I was all those years when I was paying for it on my own.’ And Hobby Lobby, which is an evangelical company, came out and said, ‘Alright, we’ll do it, we’ll do it for all of it except four that end a fertilized egg.
Whether one appreciates Kelly’s hard interview tactics and personal vehemence or not, one thing is for certain – As long as Fox News continues to give shows to big personalities who are willing to look a bit ridiculous in order to pull ratings, it will continue to rule the cable news scene for quite some time. (Especially with the retirement of Stephen Colbert.)
Image via YouTube