On Sunday, new NBC hire Megyn Kelly announced she would be airing a new interview with, of all people, the malevolent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Jones has had his visibility boosted of late due to the attentions of Donald Trump, his family and his campaign; apparently this now justifies giving the hateful and forever-lying cretin his own extended Father’s Day interview on a major news network.
While Jones is a prolific dispenser of odious false claims, from the assertion that the 9/11 attacks were an "inside job" by the government to his promotion of the ludicrous claim that a Washington-area pizza restaurant was the hub of a Hillary Clinton-linked child trafficking operation, he is probably most despised for his claims that the mass murder of grade-school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School—an event that shook the entire nation—were a government hoax. His claims that the children didn't die, that the parents didn't really grieve: this is what finally rendered that man persona non grata in any and all non-frothing company.
The families are, as should be expected, absolutely furious.
Nelba Márquez-Greene saw the interview, scheduled to air Sunday — Father’s Day — as an “egregious offense” to fathers whose children were murdered Dec. 14, 2012, in Newtown, Conn.
“To give Alex Jones a platform on Father’s Day is especially cruel to me,” she told The Washington Post. [...]
Márquez-Greene said her concerns weren’t necessarily over Jones but on “the people he inspires.”
Which is, of course, the point. Alex Jones is a publicity whore. As is the case with most other high-profile conspiracy theories, he gains attention and financial profit from stoking the deepest fears of unstable and paranoid people. He publicizes insane theories about ordinary people; those people are then subjected to armed men wandering into pizza parlors or harassing phone calls from Jones fans demanding you come clean on your murdered child not really ever existing in the first place. It is truly hateful, despicable work. Day after day, Jones broadcasts to that very small subset of Americans stupid or paranoid enough to believe the things he tells them. Day after day, Jones fills their heads with the notion that true patriots would not stand for his imaginary claims, and that they should act to resist the forces against them. Increasingly, his listeners do.
So why the flying hell, one might ask, would NBC's new hire be eager to give a wider voice to that? After Twitter fairly melted down in rage over her announcement, Kelly defended herself:
A call to Kelly’s publicist was not returned, but in a tweet responding to criticisms Sunday night, the host said the media needed to “shine a light” on who Jones is, particularly because of the layer of legitimacy he’s receiving from the White House.
Here's a thought: Do that without granting him an extended prime-time interview. Do it the Real Journalism way, by highlighting his statements and the curious silence from the White House. Declaring that the children murdered by a gunman at Sandy Hook were hoaxes perpetrated by a gun-hating government is not a let's hear from both sides claim. It is not fodder for the soft-focus interview mill. It is not a claim that merits treating its advocates with any of the conventions reserved for the famous or the powerful. Objectively false claims peddled by crooked people for profit and self-promotion should be treated, by any true journalist, with open hostility. With condemnation. With contempt.
The snippets of Kelly's conversation included in her announcement of the interview indeed touched upon his deeply offensive claims—and, in interview fashion, obligingly included his rebuttals and his reassertions of his claims.
It’s impossible not to be at a loss here. Giving one of America's worst people his own high-profile platform to spout asinine falsehoods to a nation already awash in them seems indefensible—the equivalent of granting a high-profile white supremacist an extended interview for a prime-time debate on white supremacy. Doing so after a national election in which false and fabricated “news” played a nontrivial role in swaying our national discourse itself seems an expression of contempt towards that public.
It may be that a somewhat-floundering Megyn Kelly is indeed going for straight sensationalism, as she did in an oddly milquetoast interview with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. It may be that she is merely an adherent of the school of celebrity journalism, a school that believes that the relative fame of a person, whether it be Jones or Spicer or Trump, is a more significant measure of the newsworthiness of their claims than are the truth of those claims, or their base morality, or the consequences of that rhetoric.
Is this where we are now? Because Donald Trump has flattering things to say about a malevolent conspiracy theorist, the new news of the day will not be condemning Trump for his embrace of a lunatic, but elevation of the malignancy to even-higher profiles in an attempt to both sides ... objective reality itself?
It seems to be. And the furious rush by both NBC and CNN to embrace and grant voice to all of Trump's most malignant constituencies, from white nationalists to propagandists to this ... cretin ... clearly demonstrates that they believe their own success can only come about by elevating those voices at the expense of everything else. How ... vile.