On leaked questions before the first Republican debate on Fox:
He called Fox executives, saying he’d heard that her first question “was a very pointed question directed at him.” This disconcerted her, because it was true: It was about his history of using disparaging language about women.
She doesn’t speculate where the leak came from. (She reports. You decide.) But that’s another unambiguous takeaway from this book: Parts of Fox — or, at the very least, Roger Ailes, the network’s chairman until July, when he was given the boot after several allegations of sexual harassment were made against him — seemed to be nakedly colluding with the Republican presidential nominee.
“Folks were starting to worry about Trump — his level of agitation did not match the circumstances,” Ms. Kelly writes. “Yes, it was his first debate. But this was bizarre behavior, especially for a man who wanted the nuclear codes.”
On Kelly's concern about Donald Trump's treatment of women:
She was the hen in the Fox house, taking it upon herself to ask at nearly every turn: Shouldn’t we be concerned that the Republican nominee for president is profoundly disrespectful of women in his public discourse? And accused of being a sexual predator at that?
On Trump's often unpredictable and erratic responses to her show:
Ms. Kelly writes that her problems started in August, the Monday before the first Republican presidential primary debate. She had just done a segment on her show, “The Kelly File,” that infuriated Mr. Trump. He refused to make his own scheduled appearance on her show unless she phoned him personally.
“I almost unleashed my beautiful Twitter account against you,” she says he told her, “and I still may.”
And then later:
As we all know, Mr. Trump did unleash his beautiful Twitter account on Ms. Kelly after that debate, and it threatened to upend her life. He called her “overrated,” “angry,” “crazy” and “a bimbo”; he went on CNN with Don Lemon, opposite her show’s time slot, and said there was blood coming out of Ms. Kelly’s eyes, “blood coming out of her … whatever.” (My favorite response to this: Katie Couric wrote Ms. Kelly a note asking: “Are you okay? Do you need some Tampax?”)
And the book also reveals another possible explanation for Trump's animosity toward Kelly:
Part of Mr. Trump’s response seemed like that of a man betrayed: Months before announcing his candidacy, he had tried hard to curry Ms. Kelly’s favor. He sent her notes, including an attagirl scrawled across her picture in The New York Times Magazine. (When Vanity Fair reported this, Mr. Trump denied it; Ms. Kelly includes proof, a picture.) Ms. Kelly and her husband declined an invitation to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s fabled estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Then Mr. Trump tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to persuade her to let him pick up the tab for the weekend she spent with two girlfriends at the Trump SoHo hotel.
“This is actually one of the untold stories of the 2016 campaign,” Ms. Kelly writes. “I was not the only journalist to whom Trump offered gifts clearly meant to shape coverage. Many reporters have told me that Trump worked hard to offer them something fabulous — from hotel rooms to rides on his 757.”
Well we all know how Trump responds when he is rejected by women.
However if this is accurate, and part of Trump's seemingly unrelenting irritation with Kelly had to do with her rejection of him, should we then assume that the hosts of the shows on which he regularly appears (Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Joe Scarborough) accepted those bribes?
And where was Fox News head Roger Ailes during this time when one of his most popular anchors was under attack?
“Every time he started in,” Ms. Kelly writes of Mr. Trump, “I’d get a call from Roger (who was getting calls from Trump). Was I being fair to Trump? Was I being too hard on him? He felt the bar for skeptical Trump coverage should be higher.”
When Mr. Trump discharged his first round of spite tweets, Ms. Kelly’s husband, the novelist Douglas Brunt, demanded to know what Fox was going to do. “I told him the truth. ‘Nothing for now.’” Instead, the network tried appeasement. “Roger was talking to Trump daily,” she writes, “trying to calm him down.”
Personally I would think that, unless Fox News is about to go an entirely different direction, Megyn Kelly's chances of renewing her contract with the cable news station are somewhere between nil and "Are you fucking kidding me?"
But somehow I don't think that she will have much difficultly finding another job.
Source http://ift.tt/2fLBumc
