Megyn Kelly righteously made the case for working mothers yesterday when she took on Fox News contributor Erick Erickson and Lou Dobbs for their now-infamous comments that breadwinner mothers are somehow unnatural, bad for children and/or antithetical to the “typically” “dominant role” of the male. But before anyone goes lionizing her, consider the likelihood that she was doing exactly what Fox News wanted her to do.
To be sure, Kelly has at times done a decent job on sex and gender issues. But not always. Remember when she helped rehab Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” comment? When she characterized Sandra Fluke’s call for contraception coverage in health insurance as a sense of “entitlement” – as she allowed a guest to slut shame Fluke? Or how Kelly made her resentment plain when the Susan G. Komen foundation reversed its decision, after a public outcry, to cut funding to Planned Parenthood? We remember. Coincidently, supporting Mitt Romney and slamming Sandra Fluke and Planned Parenthood are all consistent with the Fox News Party line.
So color me a tad resistant to the idea of Kelly as any kind of brave truthteller, even if she is a working Mom herself who undoubtedly took personal exception to Erickson’s comments. Don’t get me wrong. I give Kelly credit for her plain-spoken, no-nonsense shattering of Erickson’s argument. But I seriously doubt she did it without support from management.
Earlier this week, Salon.com published an excerpt from “Fox mole” Joe Muto’s memoir about his years as an O’Reilly Factor producer. In it, he says:
Theoretically, each show could talk about whatever they wanted to talk about, and take any angle they wanted to take, and book any guest they wanted to have on.
Realistically, there was tremendous pressure to hew closely to the company line. The Second Floor monitored the content of every show very closely. Each show was required to submit a list of all the guests and all the topics well before the fact; the list would be reviewed by one of the relevant vice presidents. Most of the time, this was just a formality — as I said, the showrunners knew their boundaries — but every once in a while, a certain guest or topic would set off alarm bells on the second floor, leading to a series of increasingly urgent and unpleasant e-mails and phone calls for the showrunner.
So clearly, Fox management would have been well aware what Kelly wanted to do in her segment. You’ll also note that at one point, she chides Lou Dobbs for going beyond the agreed-upon boundaries of the discussion – working mothers – to discuss unwed mothers. Another sign that Kelly’s stance had been reviewed and approved (at least to some extent) from above. It also suggests that Kelly wasn’t so interested in sticking up for anyone outside of her own personal purview.
So why would Fox News – so notoriously forbidding of “shooting in the tent” – allow one of its star anchors to do exactly that? Well, it could be they wanted to assuage Kelly’s outrage. But it also could be that they knew it would take the heat off them for promoting such sexist views in the first place. Search “Erick Erickson” on Google News right now and let’s just say he’s not making Fox look really good. So rather than fire him or publicly chastise him, just four months after they hired him, and look like they caved to public pressure (because Fox News brass surely knew what they were getting when they hired him), Fox could rehab their own image by having someone grab the headlines back with some flashy, splashy, internet-eyeball grabbing “We’re not your father’s Republican Party” theatrics. Plus, Kelly gave Fox a dollop of long-lost credence for its “fair and balanced” motto. “See, we’re not sexist, we’re unafraid of debate!” I can assure you, Fox Newsies will hold up this segment every time someone criticizes the network over Erickson’s comments from now on.
So I’ll give Kelly props for how she handled the matter. But I think the segment needs to be taken in context. Part of that context is that Fox is still a very sexist operation that Kelly, apparently, has no qualms working within. Recently, I posted a video mashup from Media Matters showing just how sexist it is. That video is the second video below, underneath the one of Kelly, Erickson and Dobbs. Also, as Matt Gertz at Media Matters recently wrote, Erickson is “a man who makes offensive comments about women. That’s who Fox hired, and apparently what they were looking for.” The other part of that context is that Kelly’s supposedly bold stance was 100% in Fox News’ own interests.
(4/21/19 update: The video of Kelly with Dobbs and Erickson is now available at Mediaite.)