Fox News host Megyn Kelly hosted J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney who she identified as a “well-known Washington whistleblower.” Adams is best known as the fabulist behind the New Black Panthers Party pseudoscandal, which Kelly extensively promoted.
Kelly presents herself in interviews as politically unbiased. Some media observers also push that claim, often pointing to her Election Night rebuttal to Karl Rove’s objections to Fox News calling Ohio for President Obama or her rebukes of Erick Erickson and Lou Dobbs for their comments on women in the workplace. But Kelly is also a champion of anti-Obama scandalmongering, notably her effort to turn the New Black Panthers Party story into a damaging attack on President Obama.
In 2010, Adams accused the Obama administration of racially-charged “corruption” for allegedly refusing to protect white voters from intimidation at the hands of minorities in the New Black Panthers Party voter intimidation case. Adams was a long-time Republican political operative who was reportedly hired as part of the Bush administration’s illegally politicized hiring of conservative Justice Department lawyers. An investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility ultimately cleared DOJ officials in 2011 of any wrongdoing or misconduct in the case.
Kelly was responsible for launching Adams’ claims into the national debate, giving him his first cable news interview in July 2010 and providing dozens of segments and hours of coverage to the story in the subsequent weeks.
Because Adams’ story did not stand up to the facts, it was quickly rejected by the Republican vice chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Fox contributors, and other media figures. Kelly in particular was criticized as being “obsessed” and conducting a “minstrel show”; her own colleague Kirsten Powers accused Kelly of “doing the scary black man thing” and promoting the claims of “a conservative activist posing as a whistleblower.”
But three years later, Kelly welcomed Adams to her December 7 program, introducing him as a “well-known Washington whistleblower.”
(Source: Fox News and MediaMatters.org)
