On NBC, Megyn Kelly Does as Megyn Kelly Has Always Done. Megyn Kelly did not appear on her NBC show.
Megyn Kelly, the vaunted and very expensive new addition to NBC’s morning, is gone — for now, and maybe for good — after saying that she didn’t see the big deal about white people wearing blackface.
“Megyn Kelly Today” on Thursday, two days after angering many with remarks about blackface.
Kelly went on hiatus from “Megyn Kelly Today” on Thursday, after a Tuesday segment defending white people for wearing dark-pigmented makeup in Halloween costumes.
she asked. “When I was a kid, that was O.K. as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.”It was jaw-dropping.
In a December 2013 segment of her old Fox News show about racial depictions of Santa Claus, she told “all you kids watching at home” that Santa was definitely white.
That history was easy enough to find for anyone who was, say, considering signing a reported $17 million annual check for a new TV host.
What brought Kelly to NBC may have been in part what brought “Roseanne” back to ABC — that dazed post-2016 state when media outlets, stunned by the election result, scrambled to make nice with Trump country.
That may not be accidental. Both Kelly’s Santa and blackface comments came in off-the-cuff remarks in what seemed planned as “light” segments about holidays and celebrations — the sort of things that aren’t considered weighty news.
But holidays are precisely the stuff of people’s deepest cultural identity and fondest memories of home and family. That’s why the annual freakout over Starbucks cups is a go-to for conservative media.
It is, at heart, the reaction of people who didn’t have to think much about sharing the world with people different from them. They were never asked to learn much about those other people, or consider how their actions and speech and “harmless” entertainment might exclude or hurt them. Now people like Kelly are being asked to learn. And they’re puzzled, or irritated, or downright angry about it.
NBC knew Kelly’s Fox résumé, after all. It should have known that, in 2013, with the support of Fox and its audience, she dismissed her “Santa is white” critics for making a big deal about an “offhand jest” and proving that “Fox News and yours truly are big targets.”
On Wednesday, with her colleagues condemning her, she apologized, her voice catching in her throat. “I have never been a P.C. person,” she said, “but I do understand the value of being sensitive to our history, particularly on race and ethnicity.”
I don’t pretend to read minds or hearts. Maybe Kelly truly sees this time that she said something wrong — as opposed to just unwise — and that she genuinely wants to learn, grow and change.
People can do this. They should perhaps not be paid $17 million a year to do it. Maybe, when it comes to matters as basic as this, the learning part should come first.
Source: NYTimes
