Megyn Kelly’s the problem with the sewer you and I know as the Nonconsensual Broadcasting Company, huh? Grok this: A day after the biggest star in the news division is exposed as a sexual predator of longstanding, with potentially dozens of enablers inside 30 Rock having kept the secret of him pressing the door-lock button under his desk and yanking his co-workers’ pants off before they passed out, there are anonymous “Today” show staffers grumbling to the Daily Mail that they’re mad at Kelly for the way she chose to complain about it.
A useful rule of thumb for NBC employees. Before you say anything negative off the record about any other co-worker, try to say something negative on the record about the degenerate you worked for and with for decades. As though you’re in any way surprised at what he was up to.
Staffers at The Today Show have expressed their disgust and outrage at Megyn Kelly for her smug, self-aggrandizing display and insensitivity to her distraught colleagues in the wake of Matt Lauer’s firing…
Kelly used her platform on her show Wednesday to say: ‘This one does hit close to home. I too have known Matt for a long time and he has been a friend and kind and supportive to me in my transition to NBC News.’…
‘We work in an industry of egos but this is the most opportunistic thing we’ve ever seen,’ said one staffer.
‘We now have the highest paid person at NBC News hosting one of the lowest rating shows, and rather than being humble, she takes the first opportunity to take the spotlight and make it all about her and what she knew…
‘No one wanted Megyn here, she was forced upon us and today reinforced why she will never be a member of the Today family.’…
A staffer said: ‘Megyn on the other hand saw this as an opportunity to mark her territory within NBC News. Yet she failed and she’s now lost the support of everyone’
Until yesterday being part of “the Today family” apparently involved receiving dildos as “gifts” from Matt Lauer along with a note about how they might be used so presumably Kelly’s not broken up about being the black sheep. (Former Lauer co-host Meredith Vieira claimed last year that she once saw a “huge bag of sex toys” in Lauer’s office, which Lauer laughed off as having been given to him by a sex therapist for a segment. In hindsight that was probably just him preparing to play Secret Santa in the office.) You would think these A-holes would appreciate at least that Kelly went to bat for Lauer in her monologue instead of knifing him, noting that he was welcoming to her when she joined NBC at a moment when many people were critical. She could have piled on him by treating him as an unmitigated villain but instead she told the truth about how he’d treated her personally. That’s pretty “team player” under the circumstances. But instead of appreciating it, the “Today” crew that’s privately upset at Lauer for ruining their collective reputation looked for a convenient whipping boy. That’s Kelly, the overcompensated interloper from — shudder — Fox News.
Why shouldn’t she make Lauer’s firing partly “about her,” anyway? It is partly about her. With the exception of Gretchen Carlson, there may be no one at Fox who played a bigger role in getting Roger Ailes ousted and getting the network to clean up its act than Kelly did. It was her account of being harassed by him, which he apparently did quite aggressively, that reportedly doomed Ailes during Fox’s internal investigation into his behavior. Fox was trying to re-sign her at the time and may have felt extra pressure to dump him in hopes that punishing him would persuade Kelly to stay with the network. Who knows if he would have continued as president if she hadn’t made a fuss. After he was fired she wrote about her experience of being harassed by him in a book published nearly a year before the Weinstein news broke and the “Pervnado” began in earnest. Did Kelly’s example encourage any women to come forward, believing that the culture would now be more receptive to their claims than in years past? Would liberal outlets have felt as comfortable exposing left-wing malefactors like Weinstein if Fox hadn’t already purged Ailes and Bill O’Reilly? Who knows? But the fact remains: Ailes was the most powerful man in American news and Kelly was by far the most prominent woman anchor at his network and she helped put a stop to his behavior after 20 years of futility by others. His professional demise was a lesson that no predator is, or should be, untouchable. So yeah, the storm of sexual harassment exposes is a little bit “about her,” for fark’s sake.
And it’s a little bit about the “Today” show staff too, in a different way. The more we learn about Lauer, the more implausible it becomes that the people around him didn’t know what he was doing around the office. Watch Variety bureau chief Ramin Setoodeh accuse NBC executives and Lauer’s “Today” co-hosts — current and former — of having presented a weepy facade when the news about Lauer broke even though, allegedly, they had a good idea of what he was up to. Quote: “It wasn’t even considered a secret.” On the long, long list of people at NBC to be angry at for Lauer’s reign of terror, Megyn Kelly is at the bottom, far below the “Today” staffers who are bitching about her. And they know that better than anyone.
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