She’s exposed as having a point of view, rather than being a purely impartial arbiter of news. Now he’s just having fun as a larger war between him and the network’s powers-that-be looms. In exposing Kelly, he’s employed at least parts of an unwritten playbook for political warfare his former, longtime aide–legendary GOP trickster Roger Stone–has laid out mostly informally over the years called “Stone’s Rules.” Stone hasn’t actually published the “Rules” anywhere, though some appear littered throughout his Twitter account and in a profile that the Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash wrote of him in 2007.
Stone, ironically, is a Fox News Contributor. He left the Trump campaign operation a few weeks ago—Trump says he fired Stone, while Stone says he quit—but he’s become one of the Donald’s biggest supporters on the outside in no time at all appearing on virtually every television show he can to tout Trump’s candidacy. “Never miss the opportunity to have sex or be on television, as Gore Vidal said,” Stone told the New York Times for a fashion profile on him this week.
Stone has worked in Republican politics for decades and helped Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan win elections. There’s no indication he’s involved in this Trump play against Kelly in any way, shape or form—he says he quit the Trump campaign because Trump insisted on this fight with Kelly—but his decades of influence on Trump, and his style, are clearly on display here.
“Hit it from every angle. Open multiple fronts on your enemy. He must be confused, and feel besieged on every side,” probably the most important of “Stone’s Rules” reads, according to the Labash profile. That’s exactly what Trump has done to Kelly, and as she’s been “confused” amid a barrage of attacks, she’s made the critical mistake Trump had been hoping she’d make: she showed her hand, abandoning impartiality with people other than him.
In the past two days, contrasts between her interviews with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Univision’s Jorge Ramos have thrust into public display a willingness on her part to allow a liberal narrative forward while crushing a conservative narrative. Technically speaking, most of the individual questions—with the exception of one to Cruz—she asked of both of them were all independently acceptable questions. However, the way she handled the interviews as a whole in the context of the political debate indicates she is a journalist who has made up her mind about the 2016 election, and that she has a decided and clear point of view about the presidential candidacy of Trump.
Her point of view is one more fitting of a pundit, television personality, or opinion leader than that of a journalist or straight-down-the-middle news anchor or reporter—and she’s using her position on the Fox News Channel to further that point of view rather than acting as an impartial arbiter of the 2016 presidential race. There’s nothing wrong with that—opinion journalists exist everywhere in media from online outlets like this one to television stations of all stripes, including on the Fox News Channel in folks like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, among others. But it’s clear from the narrative she’s pushing on her show that Kelly wants to take Trump out. Kelly will do everything within her power to undermine Trump’s candidacy. In response, Trump has been taking his battle axe driving public opinion to chop Kelly’s carefully crafted impartial public image to pieces.
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