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Trump fires back: Megyn Kelly not a 'quality journalist'
The Hill ^ | August 25, 2015 | Jesse Byrnes

Posted on 08/25/2015 12:02:07 PM PDT by maggief

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump fired back at Fox News on Tuesday after the network's head and several of its star personalities criticized him in an ongoing feud over anchor Megyn Kelly.

The celebrity real estate tycoon said he "totally" disagreed with a statement from Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes that defended Kelly's "tough but fair" questioning of Trump at the GOP debate Aug. 6.

"I do not think Megyn Kelly is a quality journalist. I think her questioning of me, despite all of the polls saying I won the debate, was very unfair," Trump said in his statement, reiterating past criticisms of the host.

"Hopefully in the future I will be proven wrong and she will be able to elevate her standards to a level of professionalism that a network such as FOX deserves," Trump added in the statement.

A slew of Fox News hosts and personalities slammed Trump after he reignited a feud with the network and its star anchor Monday night, when Kelly returned to the airwaves following a 10-day vacation.

Trump shared several tweets critical of the female host, including one referring to her as a "bimbo."

That set off a series of social media responses from several of her colleagues, including Bret Baier, who told Trump to move on, and Sean Hannity, who told the businessman to "leave @megynkelly alone."

Ailes also issued a lengthy statement Tuesday defending Kelly from Trump's criticism:

“Donald Trump's surprise and unprovoked attack on Megyn Kelly during her show last night is as unacceptable as it is disturbing. Megyn Kelly represents the very best of American journalism and all of us at FOX News Channel reject the crude and irresponsible attempts to suggest otherwise.

"I could not be more proud of Megyn for her professionalism and class in the face of all of Mr. Trump’s verbal assaults. Her questioning of Mr. Trump at the debate was tough but fair, and I fully support her as she continues to ask the probing and challenging questions that all presidential candidates may find difficult to answer.

"Donald Trump rarely apologizes, although in this case, he should. We have never been deterred by politicians or anyone else attacking us for doing our job, much less allowed ourselves to be bullied by anyone and we’re certainly not going to start now. All of our journalists will continue to report in the fair and balanced way that has made FOX News Channel the number one news network in the industry.”

Despite doubling down again on his criticism of Kelly, Trump also suggested that he may be ready to move on from the public dispute, saying "more importantly" he was pleased to see several new polls showing him in the lead.

"I will be in Iowa tonight with my speech being broadcast live on CNN and other networks," Trump concluded. "My sole focus in running for the Presidency is to Make America Great Again!"


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; US: New York
KEYWORDS: 2016election; ailes4jeb; bleeder; bloodymegyn; demagogicparty; dumptrump; election2016; foxnews; hackjournalist; megynkelly; memebuilding; newyork; partisanmediashill; partisanmediashills; rupert4jeb; substandardquality; trump; unfairunbalanced
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To: maggief

161 posted on 08/25/2015 1:50:29 PM PDT by PhilDragoo (Hussein: Islamo-Commie from Fakistan)
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To: Trapped Behind Enemy Lines
The Trump movement to me has all of the markings of a cult of personality.

I plead guilty. In a thinly disguised fascist state, you're going to get that. Witness Barky's appeal to the orcs and trolls. Conservatives are hoping against hope for the return of something lost. Ain't going to happen. The scum have had their fascist. I want one with whom I am more comfortable. If anyone can show me that the electoral system or anything else about the political institutions of this country still work as they should, maybe I'll change my mind.

162 posted on 08/25/2015 1:52:00 PM PDT by Stentor ("The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.")
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To: RoosterRedux

Exactly. That is the cost of doing business in a liberal city, state or states.


163 posted on 08/25/2015 1:53:55 PM PDT by Lumper20 ( clown in Chief has own Gov employees Gestapo)
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To: maggief

chivalry requires the boss to react

Trump knows better to go to war with a man that buys ink by the barrel


164 posted on 08/25/2015 1:54:28 PM PDT by bert ((K.E.; N.P.; GOPc.;+12, 73, .. Iran deal & holocaust: Obama's batting clean up for Adolph Hitler)
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To: Mount Athos

Trump, is a pretty good judge of character and talent. I think he’s speaking truthfully to some extent, in that he does NOT think she is that good a journalist. Why should he apologize for that. Bimbo? Did that really come from him?


165 posted on 08/25/2015 1:57:16 PM PDT by nikos1121 ("There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." Thoreau)
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To: nickcarraway

“When was I gone?”

That’s a relative term, but I was just joining those who wish you’d go away! And as far as “telling the truth” is concerned, let’s just say that your “truth” is another’s “fiction.”But what the hell, you just keep rattling on, it’s a free country and this is Free Republic.


166 posted on 08/25/2015 1:58:56 PM PDT by vette6387
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To: roadcat

Thank you... Again Trump shows how the media works or doesn’t.


167 posted on 08/25/2015 1:59:46 PM PDT by crager (I went to look for myself and if I happen to return while I'm gone tell me to wait.)
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To: JediJones

‘Trump has decided one of the most important issues he should focus on as a presidential candidate is picking on a female blonde TV journalist.
The country’s got real problems and Trump prefers to focus again and again on a triviality that doesn’t matter to any of us.’

This is a VERY poorly thought out post. Trump has spelled out the important issues repeatedly. To not know this you have to be deaf and blind, or intentionally warping the facts. Kelly has NEVER been listed as an important issue, nor is she a mainstay of his campaign speeches [I feel as if I’m explaining the basics to a child]. He focusses more on the life and death issues facing the country than any other candidate. That is why he holds a commanding lead.

Tweets take a matter of seconds. Trump sends out a limited number per day, which a subset of his supporters absolutely LOVE. He knows what he’s doing, which cannot be said of his detractors. They seem to go out of their way to illustrate that they don’t know squat.


168 posted on 08/25/2015 2:05:48 PM PDT by Fantasywriter (Any attempt to do forensic work using Internet artifacts is fraught with pitfalls. JoeProbono)
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To: vette6387

I have to speak for the silent minority who don’t want to be bullied.


169 posted on 08/25/2015 2:07:37 PM PDT by nickcarraway
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To: Fantasywriter

And all the other important issues were asked about in the debate. So nitpicking one question you didn’t like is no different than nitpicking one tweet you don’t like.


170 posted on 08/25/2015 2:10:29 PM PDT by JediJones (The #1 Must-see Filibuster of the Year: TEXAS TED AND THE CONSERVATIVE CRUZ-ADE)
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To: MayflowerMadam
"If Megyn knew her history she’d have corrected him and reminded him that MLK was a Republican.",

You mean like this?

JFK and RFK Were Right to Wiretap MLK | Human Events Allan H. Ryskind | Friday Feb 24, 2006 11:44 AM

The Kennedy Administration engaged in an unforgivable act of government intrusion when it wiretapped Dr. Martin Luther King. That view is baked into the history books, and Jimmy Carter was just reprising this theme in his eulogy to Coretta Scott King. But the truth is that the famous civil rights leader brought those wiretaps on himself. This is not an untold story, as much as it is a forgotten one.

The Cold War was in full swing in late 1963 when Bobby Kennedy authorized the first King wiretap. On JFK’s watch, Khrushchev had put up the Berlin Wall and had almost provoked a nuclear exchange by introducing atomic-armed missiles into Cuba. “Wars of National Liberation” were being fully stoked by the shoe-pounder in the Kremlin. Yet King, already a powerful civil rights figure, had surrounded himself with several radical advisers, including at least two long-time members of the Communist Party.

Stanley Levison was one of them. He may have been, as King’s friendly biographer, David Garrow sometimes suggests, King’s most trusted adviser from 1956 until the civil rights leader’s death in 1968. Levison, an important CP member, was also responsible for placing on the board of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference Hunter Pitts (Jack) O’Dell, who became a member of the national committee of the U.S. Communist Party in 1959. These were the indisputable facts that eventually impelled the Kennedy Administration to wiretap King.

Levison’s Red Ties

Levison’s closeness to King is beyond question. Proof can be found in the FBI files on Levison — many of which are in this author’s possession — and in Garrow’s prodigious works, including his 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of King, Bearing the Cross. Garrow, with additionally released FBI files on hand, also focused sharply on the Levison-King relationship in the July-August 2002 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

Here’s some of what we know: Levison met King for the first time in 1956. “[A] special relationship quickly blossomed,” says Garrow, and “from the late 1950s until King’s death in 1968, it was without a doubt King’s closest friendship with a white person.”

Garrison writes that in April 1957 Levison “was counseling King about the first major national address that King would deliver — from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on May 17. Over the ensuing months, Levison negotiated a book contract for King’s own account of the Montgomery boycott, Stride Toward Freedom, and then offered King line-by-line criticism and assistance in editing and polishing the book’s text.”

Levison also took charge of other tasks, says Garrow, “ranging from writing King’s fundraising letters to preparing his tax returns.”

Garrow also notes: On Jan. 4, 1962, Isadore Wofsy, a top Communist Party member with whom Levison was in touch, informed undercover FBI agent Jack Childs that “Levison had had a major hand in writing a King speech delivered to the AFL-CIO’s annual national convention a month before.”

King and Levison “grew closer over the years,” Garrow informs us, with King eagerly seeking Levison’s advice on countless matters, both great and small. Even after King had been warned by Kennedy Administration officials about Levison’s background, King refused to abandon his good friend and advisor.

Levison’s influence with King was clear and irrefutable, as was his commitment to communism. Morris and Jack Childs, who had been committed Communists themselves in the 1930s and 1940s, knew all about Levison. The Childs brothers had become disenchanted with communism by 1948 but managed to penetrate the party’s highest echelons in the early 1950s, this time as FBI informers. Their remarkable escapades, including Morris’s critical meetings with key Kremlin leaders, are told in the authoritative Operation Solo, written by the late John Barron and published by Regnery (a Human Events sister company). Barron, who spoke Russian, was a renowned expert on the KGB and Soviet counter-espionage activities.

By 1946, Barron’s book informs us, Levision, then 34, had “gained admission into the inner circle of the Communist underground.” Barron writes that Jack Childs informed the FBI in the 1950s that Levison “helped establish party business fronts and collected money from party ‘angels’ in Hollywood and on Wall Street.” In 1955, Phillip Bart, who “brought” Morris back into the party (without, of course, realizing Morris was working for the FBI), told Jack that Levison and his twin brother, Roy, were now in charge of the CP’s party finances.

Jack, in 1958, reported a conversation with James Jackson, the party secretary in charge of “Negro and Southern Affairs.” Jackson claimed that he and Eugene Dennis, then the top CP leader, had conferred with the “most secret and guarded people who are in touch with, consulting with and guiding [Martin] Luther King.” He didn’t mention any names, but said they were “party guys” and left the unmistakable impression that he was talking about Levison and O’Dell.

On May 6, 1960, Jack Childs, according to Barron, reported to the Bureau: “Hunter Pitts [Jack] O’Dell is working full time in connection with the King mass meeting to be held in Harlem on May 17, 1960. Working closely with O’Dell are Stanley and Roy Levison. … CP policy at the moment is to concentrate upon Martin Luther King.”

Levison, according to Garrow, “recruited” O’Dell back in 1959 to become the “administrator of SCLC’s two-person New York Office…” When asked by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1958 if he was a Communist Party member, O’Dell hid behind the 5th Amendment. In December 1959, according to an FBI report, he was elected a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party.

In mid-June of 1962, the bug in Levison’s office picked up Levison’s own description of how he, in Garrow’s words, “had recommended that King hire Jack O’Dell as his administrative assistant in Atlanta.” (Nothing came of that recommendation, but Levison was clearly comfortable in trying to elevate O’Dell’s influence. )

An FBI surveillance team, notes Barron, also discovered another Levison connection when he was advising King: “KGB officer Victor Lessiovsky, a sophisticated and engaging operative well known to Western security services.” Lessiovsky, according to Barron, “specialized in influence operations, that is, in inducing influential foreigners to do, wittingly or unwittingly, what the Soviet Union wanted them to do.”

Thus, when Martin Luther King began plans for his famous 1963 March on Washington, JFK and his brother, Bobby, were very concerned, with good reason. They had already sent warnings to King to separate from both Levison and O’Dell through several top administration officials. Then, in June 1963, President Kennedy himself, after a meeting with black leaders at the White House, met alone with King in the Rose Garden.

Never Severed Relations

JFK had been fearful for some time that the Soviets may have been manipulating King through the American CP and through Levison in particular. He warned King that he was in danger of losing his civil rights cause altogether because of his loyalty to both Levison and O’Dell. “They’re Communists,” he informed King, according to Garrow’s account. “You’ve got to get rid of them.” King never severed his relations with either man, even though he pledged that he would and lied about doing so to Kennedy officials on several occasions.

And that’s why the Kennedy brothers felt it necessary to tap King’s telephone. They would have been derelict in their duties if they hadn’t.

Martin Luther King is remembered by Americans for his achievements in furthering equal rights for blacks, but many believe he was also manipulated by the far-left, including CP members. When he firmly hitched the civil rights movement to the “anti-war” movement during the Vietnam war, he appeared to take the side of the violent Communists in Hanoi rather than of those who genuinely opposed the conflict in that country for religious reasons. He labeled this nation as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” accused President Johnson of lying about Hanoi’s “peace” overtures and likened this country to Nazi Germany for trying to defend South Vietnam from a Communist takeover.

171 posted on 08/25/2015 2:12:29 PM PDT by Pelham (Without deportation you have defacto amnesty)
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To: Snickering Hound

I’ll take this any day over the far-left hags, wookiees, blimps and she-beasts populating CNN and MSNBC.


172 posted on 08/25/2015 2:13:40 PM PDT by JediJones (The #1 Must-see Filibuster of the Year: TEXAS TED AND THE CONSERVATIVE CRUZ-ADE)
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To: nickcarraway

“I have to speak for the silent minority who don’t want to be bullied.”

Sorry Nick, but no one is part of any silent minority here on FR. Everyone has an equal voice. Judging from the blowback you get, it looks like if anyone is in any “minority,” it’s you. But good luck on your “mission” to “educate” us all, it’s fun to watch the incoming you take.


173 posted on 08/25/2015 2:15:32 PM PDT by vette6387
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To: CodeToad

‘It is very liberal. I see him and a few others as nothing but Kalifornia style liberals.’

On this we agree.

+1


174 posted on 08/25/2015 2:15:57 PM PDT by Fantasywriter (Any attempt to do forensic work using Internet artifacts is fraught with pitfalls. JoeProbono)
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To: JediJones

You’re becoming incoherent.


175 posted on 08/25/2015 2:17:24 PM PDT by Fantasywriter (Any attempt to do forensic work using Internet artifacts is fraught with pitfalls. JoeProbono)
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To: maggief
This is how Donald started courting the first three wives.

Melania better watch her back.

176 posted on 08/25/2015 2:21:04 PM PDT by x
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To: nickcarraway

This is an even stupider post. I see now why so many consider you a troll. If you believe that Trump watching the segments of the show in which he was personally discussed, and commenting on it, means he’s in love with Kelly...then you are beyond the pale. Enjoy your alternate reality. Just don’t ask me to share it.


177 posted on 08/25/2015 2:22:40 PM PDT by Fantasywriter (Any attempt to do forensic work using Internet artifacts is fraught with pitfalls. JoeProbono)
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To: Fantasywriter

Nope, I used your own words against you and hit the bullseye right on the target.

You defended Trump for tweeting insults to Megyn because he spends a lot of the rest of his time on more important issues.

Yet you bash Megyn for one debate question you didn’t like when the entire debate was full of substantive questions about the issues.

Why the hypocrisy?


178 posted on 08/25/2015 2:23:03 PM PDT by JediJones (The #1 Must-see Filibuster of the Year: TEXAS TED AND THE CONSERVATIVE CRUZ-ADE)
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To: FlJoePa

Tomi is no longer with OAN.

As a side note, she was on Fox & Friends last Friday and tweeted she will soon begin a new chapter in her life.

Sarah Palin is filling in this week and my understanding there will be rotating hosts until a permanent replacement is found.


179 posted on 08/25/2015 2:24:40 PM PDT by newfreep ("Evil succeeds when good men do nothting" - Edmund Burke)
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To: JediJones

Please link me to my post in which I ‘bash’ Kelly for one debate question.


180 posted on 08/25/2015 2:25:08 PM PDT by Fantasywriter (Any attempt to do forensic work using Internet artifacts is fraught with pitfalls. JoeProbono)
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