Megyn Kelly Unfairly Criticized for Cutting Off Tom Brokaw During Anti-NRA Rant
Over the past nine days, we’ve chronicled Megyn Kelly‘s shaky start as host of Megyn Kelly Today. And we’re still a bit skeptical that Kelly can achieve her stated goal of leaving politics behind in favor of lighter fare while pulling down strong ratings.
But there’s one point of criticism spreading across the Internet today which we deem to be unfair. Numerous outlets have taken, Kelly to task for abruptly cutting off Tom Brokaw as the former NBC Nightly News anchor was on a rant criticizing the NRA.
“We’re up against a hard break,” Kelly said, talking over Brokaw. “Apologies, Tom Brokaw.”
A hard break — for those not versed in television lingo — is a commercial timeout that MUST be taken (except in the most rare of occurrences — like breaking news on par with the Las Vegas shooting massacre, for instance). When up against a hard break, a host has no choice but to wrap the segment. If not, the segment will be stopped for them — as a commercial will begin playing automatically at a designated time.
Seasoned Today viewers know that by 26 and 56 after each hour, the show goes to a commercial break which, in many markets, includes a brief local news update. Today has played around a bit with this format during the 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. time slots — with the Kelly predecessor Today’s Take, and the hour featuring Kathy Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb occasionally broadcasting through the bottom of the hour.
But Kelly appears to be working off of the preferred Today format. A check of all five of her previous broadcasts via the media monitoring service TV Eyes shows that Kelly went to a break at 9:25 a.m. NBC confirmed to Mediaite that Kelly did indeed have to throw to commercial at that time.
Much of the confusion stemmed from the fact that Brokaw continued talking as Kelly was trying to wrap the segment. But in an email to the Washington Post, Brokaw said he simply couldn’t hear Kelly — blaming poor acoustics in the studio and trouble with his hearing aid. (This would seem to be confirmed by the fact that Brokaw needed a question to be repeated at one point just prior to Kelly cutting him off.)
Brokaw told the Post he didn’t believe Kelly did anything wrong.
“No harm, no foul,” Brokaw wrote to the Post. “Not worth any fuss. I’m a Kelly fan.”
Watch above, via NBC.
[featured image via screengrab]
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