Megyn Kelly conducted an interview with Centers for Disease Control head Dr. Tom Frieden tonight, presumably as a balance to O’Reilly’s seething – and completely amateur – attacks on Frieden last night. But then for more “balance,” she turned to political analyst Brit Hume.
Kelly likes to call herself a “straight-news anchor” but a real straight-news anchor would have discussed Frieden’s interview with a real doctor and not a political analyst. Besides the fact that Hume has no qualifications to judge Frieden, it speaks volumes about that “straight news” claim that Kelly would look to emphasize the politics of this serious outbreak, rather than focus on the medical aspects.
But maybe Kelly thinks Hume is an expert on disease control, just like Frieden.
“Brit, what’d you think?” Kelly asked, as she opened her discussion with Hume immediately following her Frieden interview.
“Well, you asked the right questions,” Hume said, praising Kelly. However, “Dr.” Hume was not so impressed with Frieden. Hume allowed as how Frieden “seems like a very nice man and probably a fine doctor,” but Hume declared that Frieden’s explanation for not imposing that travel ban on Africans “makes no sense.”
Kelly did accurately summarize Frieden’s argument as, “The way to stop it from coming here is to eradicate it over there and the bigger the problem grows over there, and they believe a travel ban will make it bigger, the worse off we will be here.”
“Well, I don’t disagree with that,” “Dr.” Hume said. “What I fail to see is how the travel ban …would do that.” Yeah, what would Frieden know?
Hume also said that under his medical regimen we’d be “perfectly free to send personnel” into Africa. “We’re not talking about banning flights into the affected countries, we’re talking about selecting out people from those countries and keeping them from getting here for now. So I just don’t buy the whole explanation… I just don’t think that argument holds up at all.”
But if we send people into the countries, are they supposed to remain stuck there? Just go to some other country other than ours? Or are some people leaving Africa welcome to enter the U.S. while others aren’t?
Kelly didn’t ask.
Hume joins Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham in the Fox News roster of “don’t need a medical degree to know how to deal with Ebola” experts.
Watch the interviews with Frieden and Humes below.
