![]() ![]() Jones couldn’t defend his work in a legitimate setting. “Because I remember, even that day, to go back from memory, then saying, ‘But then, some of it looks like it’s real…” “Yes,” he finally answered, and quickly rifled through the drawers of his mind to shake loose something like a plausible explanation for that “yes”: You could tell he was trying to a) remember what he’d said then, and b) think of what exactly he could get away with saying now. Jones paused for about five seconds before he answered. “Was that devil’s advocate?” She reread his direct quotes, repeating, “The whole thing is a giant hoax. To which Jones squirmed and fidgeted and said ridiculous things like, “Listeners and other people are covering this, I didn’t create that story.”Īfter four or five exchanges of this sort, Jones in an offhand way suggested that maybe he was just playing “devil’s advocate” when he said what he said. Jones offered a stream of nonsensical answers to these queries, to which Kelly asked brutal and correct follow-ups, like: What happened to the children, if they weren’t killed? She challenged Jones over and over about Sandy Hook statements like, “The whole thing is a giant hoax.” ![]() Kelly graphically demonstrated the benefits of not running from your interview subject. If you bend over backwards to keep an interview subject from talking, and stack the deck in your report with negative takes and loads of derisive voice-over, what viewers will perceive – 100 percent of the time – is that you’re afraid of your subject. Trying to “minimize his opportunity to appeal” to audiences also totally misunderstands how people consume media. We’re describers, not politicians, and the best way to convey the essence of Jones is to let him betray it himself. Judging a report by how tightly it keeps control over whatever you think the desired message is supposed to be is pretty much the opposite of what we’re taught to do as journalists. ![]() This is a crazy conception of how media is supposed to work. Instead, through strong voiceover, clips from Jones’ program featuring the host spouting conspiracies, and interviews with a conservative commentator who opposes Jones’ influence and the father of a child who died at Sandy Hook, Kelly explained how Jones operates, the harassment his targets experience, and his close ties to President Donald Trump.” “The segment benefited from devoting very little time to Kelly’s interview with Jones, minimizing his opportunity to appeal to her audience. In fact, groups like Media Matters went so far as to say that the best part about Kelly’s report was that it showed Jones as little as possible: This new media version of the campus “ no-platforming” movement believes that news organizations automatically help insidious figures by allowing them to speak extemporaneously, or even to be seen onscreen. Incredibly, even other media organizations contributed to this chorus, with Huffington Post going so far as to denounce Kelly for giving Jones a “platform.” Nor can they deal with the fact that he drew 83 million page views during election month last November, or that Infowars had 5.3 million unique visitors in May of last year.īut other groups objected to the report on the more general – and disturbingly prevalent – view that covering a noxious figure somehow equates to empowering that person. His actual quote was that the Jones show was like a Nazi version of Tommy Boy, which to him was too funny of an idea to have been generated unironically. “Come on, this is a gag or something,” he said. Why, I responded, that’s Alex Jones, one of the most influential people in the United States. “What do you think tap water is?” he croaks, in the broadcast. It was one of the ultimate Jones set pieces: his classic “ gay bomb” rant, where the balloon-faced TV host turns baboon-ass red working himself up into a rage about Pentagon-designed hormonal weaponry that supposedly can “turn the frickin’ frogs gay!” Last year around election time, I sent a clip of Infowars lunatic Alex Jones to a friend.
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