Kelly rips Trump

Megyn Kelly rips Trump interview critics

By Nick Gass

Megyn Kelly on Wednesday night tore into media critics of her interview with Donald Trump that aired the previous evening, accusing many of those picking apart her segments with the presumptive Republican nominee of failing to disclose their own biases against him.

"My interview with Donald Trump earning lots of viewers and lots of reviews last night. It was the second most watched show on a Tuesday on Fox Entertainment broadcast in 2016. For that we thank all of you. However it also urged the scourge of many in the mainstream media because it was not a takedown of Trump," Kelly said as she began the segment. "Not surprisingly, many of these critics failed to expose their own bias against Trump, against Fox Entertainment News or against the GOP."

Kelly went through a few examples of the negative response to her prime-time Fox Entertainment broadcast network special, including James Warren of Poynter, who called it a "soft-as-a-grape session," Eric Wemple of The Washington Post, who she said "has made no secret of his hatred for Trump" and wrote that Kelly "should dismember Donald Trump."

"Today, Wemple upset that I did not ‘get personal’ about what Trump's behavior has done to my life. As if an interview about Trump should be about me," Kelly said, before noting that Wemple's Post colleague Hank Stuever suggested she brought too much attention on herself. "He found the sitdown uninformative," she said.

Kelly mentioned that Stuever last November wrote that Trump is a "hateful, nonsensical, vainglorious presidential candidate."

But Kelly still was not done with naming and shaming her critics.

"Amy Davidson of the New Yorker said ‘I surrendered to Trump,’ who she dismisses as a ‘brazen liar,'" Kelly said. "This is the same woman who in January accused Fox Entertainment News of using yours truly as a debate moderator not for any broadcasting talent because it's ‘fun to show off the oddity of a smart blonde.’"

Media critic Howard Kurtz then joined the show, remarking that critics of Kelly "would not have been satisfied with any interview that did not leave him a bloody mess." Kurtz added another critic to Kelly's list, Slate's Isaac Chotiner, who wrote that Kelly's ballyhooed interview with Trump was "fawning, boring, and pointless."

"He's called Trump a 'bigoted, quasi-fascist and fraud,' a 'dangerously unstable demagogue,' so of course he's gonna slam any sitdown where you didn't take a baseball bat to the guy's head," Kurtz said.

Kelly concluded, "As I said, right from the beginning of this thing, I was never going to love him. And I was never going to hate him. And those who assumed either one assumed too much."

She did have nice words for the review of her interview by Time magazine, in which Daniel D'Addario wrote that there is "hope for a future in which Kelly makes TV newsmagazines, to borrow a phrase, great again."

"I'm going to hold on to that one tonight when I go to bed," Kelly said, chuckling before asking viewers to share their thoughts on social media.