Megan Kelly got a promotion from Fox News to NBC
because Donald Trump insulted her during an early Republican presidential
debate. This promotion did not include an increase in wisdom. It merely gave
her a larger audience for her to reveal her limitations. Her limitations are
considerable.
Her latest bonehead move was to interview Alex Jones. This got her in trouble with NBC, because nobody
is supposed to interview Jones. That would give him some degree of credibility.
The mainstream media do not want to consider him as anyone who deserves
credibility.
The mainstream media still believe that someone like Jones can get
credibility only from the mainstream media. They still think it's 1995.
Her response was this: she thinks he is despicable. She said that
his view of Sandy Hook as a hoax is revolting. That bought her a little time. But
time will run out on the evening of June 18, when her interview is scheduled to
be run.
Jones did what any sensible conservative should always do when
interviewed by the mainstream media. He made a secret recording of the entire
interview. He says he will release the entire interview on YouTube.
He says that he did not claim to believe the story that Sandy Hook
was a hoax. He simply said that he had offered theories regarding Sandy Hook to
his viewers.
SELECTIVE QUOTATIONS
The game the liberals play is always the same. Anything that makes
a conservative's position look sensible is eliminated by three dots. The writer
gets to pick and choose what he wants to illustrate. If he wants to illustrate
something that will make a conservative look bad, he will quote him. He will
not mention the missing qualifications to the outrageous statements.
Some journalists will quote the conservative link. When the
conservative says something sensible, the journalist then adds three dots.
These indicate a break in the interview. But most journalists don't do this.
They simply enter the quotation with a quotation mark. Then they continue to
summarize what the conservative really means, which is what the journalist
wants the reader to believe that the conservative really means. Then he
provides another brief quotation inside quotation marks. This is an ancient
technique of journalists. I've been a journalist long enough to know that this
is how the game is played.
The media have been unsuccessful in doing this to me. That is
because my statements are so outrageous and unqualified in any way that they
prove irresistible to Left-wing journalists. These people usually quote me
verbatim. I get my point across, and they get to look like heroes for having
exposed to me.
The crucial point is this: almost nobody pays any attention.
Hardly anybody reads these stories. My followers rarely read these stories.
Liberals rarely read them.
Here is reality: journalists don't have much clout. I learned this
40 years ago. "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but liberal
journalists can never hurt me." (You may quote me verbatim.)
In the case of Alex Jones, this is a bonanza for him. His
followers are laughing derisively at Megyn Kelly. She is now under the digital
sword of Damocles. If she runs her edited snippets, she will look like a fraud.
In other words, she will look like exactly what she is.
On the other hand, if the network now has some junior technician
frantically reinserting what Jones really said, Jones will look like a
semi-reasonable fellow. Kelly will still look like a fraud, because Jones
forced her hand early. He went public about the existence of his interview
before she ran her hatchet job.
She is now on the hook. I call it her Sandy Hook hook. No matter
what she runs on her show on Sunday evening, she is going to look like a fraud.
She can either be seen as a boneheaded, unwavering fraud, or she can be seen as
a cowardly fraud who reinserted Jones's qualifications, or worse, as a fraud
who refuses to run the segment on Jones, despite the fact that she promised
that she would.
BILL MOYERS VS. ME
I have been down this road before. Back in 1987, Rev. Bill Moyers planned to run a PBS show
featuring me. It was going to be part three of a three-part program on PBS. It
was a program on the New Christian Right. I was confident that I was going to
wind up as the bogeyman of the whole series.
I was proud of the whole thing. I liked to think of myself as the
bogeyman of the New Christian Right. It was good positioning back then,
although nobody cares these days. I thought of myself as Jerry Falwell with
footnotes.
Still, I was taught very early by R. J. Rushdoony to avoid
interviews by liberals. He said they will always have the upper hand. They will
get to edit whatever I say. He said that any publicity was never worth it. I
believed him.
I wrote about this incident for Lew Rockwell back in 2001. I quote
it here because my memory in 2001 was closer to 1987 than what I remember
today. I wrote this.
The Republican Party hired the
master advertiser, Rosser Reeves (Reality in Advertising), to create a
series of 30-second filmed interviews of Dwight Eisenhower, to be shown on
television. Ike answered briefly and vaguely, spot by spot, short questions
that were posed by a voice. While the filming was in progress, he asked
rhetorically after a take, "Is this what the old general is reduced
to?" It was, indeed. These paid commercials were run in states where the race
with Stevenson was considered close, most notably Ohio. (David Halberstam
devotes a fairly lengthy section of his book, The Fifties, to
Reeves' work.)
Reeves' TV spots set the pattern for subsequent politics. He
understood that the public does not remember intricate details. Viewers
remember brief phrases or images. Reeves made millions of dollars for the Mars
candy company with his slogan, "melts in your mouth, not in your
hand." The TV image of a chocolate-smeared palm is embedded in my mind
almost 50 years later.
You can buy a video produced by Bill Moyers on Reeves, the
presidency, and TV spots, "The 30-Second President." I mention this
because I once defeated Moyers by using the reverse of Reeves' strategy. He was
planning to do what I firmly believed would be a hatchet job on me in the third
segment of his 1987 PBS series, "God and Politics: On Earth As It Is in
Heaven." His staffers kept calling my two offices, begging for an
interview. They even called my pastor for an interview. I told everyone to
rebuff the requests.
Moyers' staffers kept asking my staffers, "Doesn't Dr.
North want to get his ideas across?" My silent answer was, "Yes, but
on my terms, not Bill Moyers' terms." I knew all about the power of
videotape editing. Some unknown lackey is sent out to interview a naive victim
for two hours in order to get one or two juicy sound bites, and then the
retroactively spliced-in Famous Interviewer zings the victim on-screen with
loaded questions, for which the editor splices in the victim's answers. The
victim has no power of reply and no authority to review the show ahead of time.
In writing, scholars are supposed to use ellipses to indicate dropped words: [.
. .] There are no ellipses in video editing.
The final version of Moyers' show was not complimentary to me,
but the show produced no problems for me. That was because I was nowhere to be
seen. They interviewed some of my critics, but there was no talking head of
Gary North to be guillotined (or "Billotined") by Moyers.
The TV news shows have to have a talking head or an image. If
you're not on-screen, TV's assassins will have trouble getting to you.
In retrospect, I now realize what I did to him. I Conned him. I
Billy Conned him. Joe Louis famously said of Conn, "He can run, but he
can't hide." I hid. Moyers never laid a glove on me.
CONCLUSION
Today, the intended victim can get even by posting his secret
recording on YouTube. He can get out the message that he wants to get out, and
the mainstream media cannot lay a finger on him.
There is nothing the shrinking networks can do to hurt Jones. He
can present his side of the story on YouTube. His followers will chortle.
Furthermore, every liberal journalist who is envious of Kelly's $15 million
dollar a year contract will secretly rejoice. There are probably several
thousand of them. All's well that ends well.
Alex Jones understands the limitations of the mainstream media.
Megyn Kelly does not. She has now had a lesson from a master.
