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Megyn Kelly speaks April 6 onstage at Tina Brown's seventh annual Women in the World summit in New York City. | Getty Kelly on Trump: Media has to worry about 'our souls'

For Megyn Kelly, the mainstream media's wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump is disturbing, though not necessarily for the same reasons that have elicited widespread hand-wringing over the Fourth Estate's culpability for the Republican front-runner's current status.

During a discussion with Katie Couric at the Women in the World summit on Wednesday night, the Fox News host recalled that she voiced concern to her executive producer long before the infamous debate moment about giving Trump a disproportionate amount of coverage on "The Kelly File."

"Early July, I think it was, he went down to the Mexican border and did a presser from there, and it was fascinating TV. We put it on, on ‘The Kelly File’ at 9 o’clock, and we watched it, and it was the first sort of like, ‘I can’t take my eyes off of this, what’s he gonna say next, this is something so compelling about this.’ And we saw our numbers the next day and they had soared. And then he had another presser not long thereafter, and we said let’s put that on. It was great television," Kelly recalled.

"And again, I was like, ‘What is this? I’ve never seen anything like this. What’s happening? And we looked at the numbers the next day, and they soared," she continued. "And it was at that point, we were still in July, I said to my executive producers, this was long before the debate, it had nothing to do with any feelings I had to do with Donald Trump, I said to my executive producer Tom Lowell, I said, ‘This isn’t right.’ And I said — I could see all of the other media starting to do it."

Kelly said she told Lowell that "when the post-mortem of coverage is done on the coverage of Donald Trump, wherever this race goes, let’s make sure we’re on the side of the angels."

"And I am proud to tell you that our show has not taken those pressers. And it has nothing to do with what happened with the debate," she said, alluding to her feud with Trump that began with a question in the August debate about his past inflammatory comments about women.

The show had the same policy before the debate, she emphasized.

"We don’t wallpaper the show with a Donald Trump campaign event. Why? Because we don’t do that for the other candidates. So it’s not fair," she continued. "And it’s not about — yes, we all have to worry about numbers to some extent. That’s the reality of TV news in 2016. But we also have to worry about our souls and journalism.”

Trump, Kelly said, was on friendly terms with her before he announced his presidential run, for example, sending her news clippings about her that he would sign.

"But my own belief is that when he heard that question from me, he felt betrayed," Kelly remarked. "You know, that he had been, as he said, ‘I’ve been very nice to you,’ but it was, you know it was like, I didn’t ask him to call me or send me those nice — I appreciated that it was a nice gesture but it’s not gonna stop me from asking tough questions.”