Shocker: Alex Jones Pre-Production Phone Call Exposes Megyn Kelly … Doing Her Job
The media world woke up today to find that Alex Jones had leaked a phone call with NBC News host Megyn Kelly in advance of the Sunday airing of her highly anticipated interview with the InfoWars‘ impresario.
Audio of the leaked phone call was roughly 12 minutes long, but Jones presented it with an additional 18 minutes of commentary and news clips interspersed, ostensibly designed to demonstrate Kelly’s duplicity in getting Jones to agree to sit for her interview.
But we listened to it — all of it. And far from duplicity, Jones revealed Kelly to be a stand up pro doing basic pre-production work responsibly and ethically — even when she thinks it’s off the record.
Outside the media world, the term “producer” is often conflated to lofty and enviable levels, despite the fact that television production isn’t nearly as interesting or sexy as a lot of people think. It’s really more craft than art, and the klieg lights and spotlights happen only at the end of the process (if ever.) It’s in this context that we should consider what Kelly is doing in these recordings.
We’ve edited the 30 minute clip posted by InfoWars to only feature the leaked phone call (which you can listen to below), and there is a lot to digest. Without seeing the final segment set to air this weekend, the biggest takeaway is that there is no smoking gun in this call that makes Kelly look unprofessional or even duplicitous.
If anything, she is “‘buttering up” her potential guest, but who deserves blame for that? The professional network television host (aka, the butterer), or the self-proclaimed Information Wars expert and media skeptic (aka, the butteree.)
Jones had teased the leaking of this phone call to suggest that he had been duped into thinking that this would be something other than a “gotcha hit piece.”
But Kelly was fairly clear when she said to Jones “Trust me when I tell you my goal is not to go out there and be like, ‘oh my God if I sit with her she’s gonna kill me.'” Kelly continued, “Of course, I’m going to do a fair interview. I’m still me. I’m not going to go out there and be Barbara Walters.” This makes clear that Kelly wasn’t looking for any soft-focused entertainment puff profile.
There’s lots to parse in the interview, and if Kelly is guilty of anything, its of throwing the kitchen sink of descriptors at Jones to get him to agree to the video. Kelly described herself as a “combination of Mike Wallace, Oprah Winfrey and Larry the Cable Guy.” She also seemed to bond with Jones in their apparent mutual interest in reinventing themselves, saying that she wasn’t entirely comfortable being “the pointy end of the political spear,” which is an apparent reference to her tet-a-tet with then candidate Donald Trump in 2016.
This story has been something of a media obsession of late, as Jones has been fairly criticized for promoting the debunked Pizzagate and the Sandy Hook truther conspiracies, and some advertisers have even pulled sponsorship from Kelly’s show for giving him a platform. And the way the NBC News marketing team rolled out promotion for this segment — with chummy photos — received much deserved criticism.
If Jones accomplished anything by leaking this phone call it is this: he just ratcheted up the general interest in the segment that will air on Sunday. This means NBC will probably enjoy even higher ratings and more people will get to know Alex Jones — which was very likely the desired goal for the InfoWars host all along.
Listen to the edited version of the leaked phone call below, courtesy of InfoWars:
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
