ANCHOR WEIGHS IN
Kelly’s memoir is both insightful, self-serving
Within days of publication, the knives were out for former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly’s new memoir, Settle For More. Donald Trump loyalists acted quickly to reignite the vendetta that had first erupted against Kelly in 2015 when she had dared to ask some difficult questions of their beloved candidate during the U.S. Republican presidential primaries.
Still, there’s something grimly comical in their choice of the Amazon website as their chief mode of attack — given that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post, a publication whose coverage of Trump’s shenanigans has earned it the undying enmity of the U.S. president-elect.
Amazon officials, convinced that Trump trolls had orchestrated the preponderance of one-star reviews of Kelly’s book on its website, started deleting the offending entries. But there’s an ironic twist here, given that it was Kelly’s publisher, HarperCollins, that complained to Amazon that the negative reviews had “the hallmarks of an orchestrated effort to discredit the book and our author Megyn Kelly.” HarperCollins is owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose holdings also include the ultraconservative Fox News Network, an organization jubilant over a Trump presidency — and one where Kelly had worked until her recent departure to host a daytime show on NBC.
So there’s something Byzantine about the atmosphere enveloping this absorbing but sometimes problematic book.
By the end of 2015, Kelly was under armed guard because of death threats. She and her family even needed security during a visit to Disney World in 2016. It was part of a continuing horror story that had begun when, as moderator of the first
Republican primary debate, she had asked Donald Trump about comments he had made disparaging women. Earlier on the day of that debate, Kelly had been taken violently and inexplicably ill — indeed there’s the implication that Trump forces, having been leaked the question she intended to ask, had conspired to force her absence that night. But Kelly did show up to ask Trump that incendiary question — reminding him he’d called women he didn’t like “fat pigs,” “dogs,” slobs” and “disgusting animals.”
Kelly’s entirely legitimate question unleashed a torrent of venom. It started with Trump tweeting that she was an overrated bimbo, and then in a notorious CNN interview accelerating his attack with an observation that went viral on the Internet:
“She starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions and you can see that blood was coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her — wherever.”
The subsequent vileness of the online attacks even caused soul-searching among some of Kelly’s right-wing colleagues at Fox News, an organization less than wholehearted in its support of its beleaguered anchor. “If Megyn Kelly is killed, it’s not going to help your candidate,” Fox programming executive Bill Shine warned Trump surrogate Michael Cohen, who had urged 40,000 Twitter followers to “gut” Kelly.
Personal memoirs and autobiographies are almost always self-serving in some way, and one senses a determination on Kelly’s part to convince us of her integrity. This manifests early in the book when, as an ambitious young lawyer, she struggles for gender equality in a male-dominated firm. But she’s also capable of ruthless self-appraisal. And she is good at analyzing the wider implications of what was happening to her. “It is truly bizarre to cover the news for a living and then to see you yourself actually become the news from coast to coast and beyond,” she writes. “Every time Trump acted up, it was like he flipped a switch, instantly causing a flood of intense nastiness.”
But Settle For More is also a personal success story — an account of one woman’s singleminded determination to make it to the top. And much of its value lies in what it tells us about the volatile media culture that has given us Fox News, the Twitter universe and Trump.
The gaze she levels at us from the book’s jacket exudes a poise and confidence suggesting she is not to be messed with. She did emerge still standing from the Trump wars — but at what price?
Trump, oddly, becomes her personal litmus test. They already had an abrasive relationship before the notorious 2015 primary exchange. Kelly angered Trump when she refused his offer to give her and a pair of her girlfriends a free holiday weekend at New York’s Trump Soho hotel. And she makes it clear in the book that this offer was part of a larger pattern, one that saw Trump make repeated attempts to curry her favour and also offer other journalists everything from free hotel rooms to a ride on his 757.
“This is actually one of the untold stories of the 2016 campaign,” she writes. “I was not the only journalist to whom Trump offered gifts clearly meant to shape coverage.”
It’s a dramatic revelation, but the question immediately arises — if Kelly was so concerned about journalistic integrity, why didn’t she go public about this at the time?
Furthermore, she did make temporary peace with Trump because she badly wanted him on her show during the campaign. She comes across as a supplicant when she arrives at Trump’s New York fortress, while Trump can afford to be magnanimous. So she gets her interview — a cautious encounter one critic labelled “pathetic … full of soft questions and hot air.” There is the rank aroma of compromise here.
Kelly was also willing to compromise when she says Roger Ailes, the head honcho of Fox News, began sexually harassing her years ago. These revelations are in her book, but why did she keep quiet at the time? Because her golden ring — working for Fox News — was in jeopardy. She looks back on her state of mind at the time. “I’m not the Megyn Kelly of today. I ( had) no power … and he was the most powerful man in news.”
So, despite the alleged gropings of the deposed Ailes and the torments she has suffered at the hands of the Trump brigade, Kelly has always kept her eye on the main chance — which perhaps explains why she professes to be apolitical and remain resolutely blinkered about the ideological purpose of Fox News and the ludicrousness of its claim to offer “fair and balanced” journalism.
Perhaps her most revealing admission comes on page 98: “In case you haven’t noticed by now, I really like to win.” Could we be seeing a mirror image of Trump?