Can Megyn Kelly Escape Her Past?
The Atlantic|March 2017

Charting a route into the mainstream media, Fox News’s former star has downplayed her full role in an ugly election.

Caitlin Flanagan
Can Megyn Kelly Escape Her Past?

Fox News was founded in 1996, when the entertainment impresario and conservative political consultant Roger Ailes acted on a pair of insights: that most people found television news boring and that a significant number of conservatives didn’t trust it to represent their interests and values fairly. The TV producer in Ailes saw a marketing niche, and the political operative in him saw a direct way of courting voters. Rupert Murdoch owned the network, but Ailes was its intellectual author. In the two decades since, the network has thrived without legitimate competition of any kind. It has proved to be a big tent, sheltering beneath it some excellent reporters but also a collection of blowhards, performance artists, cornballs, and Republican operatives in rehab from political failures and personal embarrassments. With the help of this antic cast, the Fox audience has come to understand something important that it did not know before: The people who make “mainstream” news and entertainment don’t just look down on conservatives and their values—they despise them.

This story is from the March 2017 edition of The Atlantic.

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This story is from the March 2017 edition of The Atlantic.

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