On the heels of a mostly toothless, poorly-received interview with Vladimir Putin during the premiere of her new NBC News show last Sunday, Megyn Kelly’s interview tonight with Alex Jones, right-wing polemicist and the host of InfoWars, offered an opportunity for the network's newest star to redeem herself. Instead, after sparking a week of controversy that blew up in NBC's face, the interview served as a little more than a tepid primer for audiences unfamiliar with the far-right internet video host.

Backlash to the announcement of Kelly’s interview with Jones had been swift, and worsened after a smiling selfie of Jones and Kelly emerged, with some questioning Kelly’s decision to give a platform to a virulent conspiracy theorist who has called 9/11 a hoax and accused the government of staging the Sandy Hook shooting. Connecticut’s NBC affiliate said it would not air the segment. Making matters worse, Jones leaked parts of a pre-interview conversation he had with Kelly, as well as a bit of the actual interview, designed to embarrass the network and discredit his interviewer. (“It’s not going to be some gotcha hit piece, I promise you that,” Kelly says in the pre-interview conversation). “You alone will be the jury as to who's fake news and who stands for America,” Jones told his audience before Sunday's show aired.

Kelly opened her interview with Jones on Sunday by addressing her critics, and giving something of a primer to her audience on Jones. “Some thought we shouldn't broadcast this interview,” she said. “But here's the thing: Alex Jones isn't going away.” Jones, who appeared sweaty and almost caught off guard throughout the NBC edit of the interview, walked back his statements about Sandy Hook in his interview with Kelly. “I do think there was some cover-up,” he said, but apparently no longer thinks the shooting was “fake” or a “hoax.” (Kelly, who focused the first part of her interview with Jones on his Sandy Hook denial, including an interview with a father of a child who died in the Sandy Hook shooting, says Jones “never completely disavowed” his previous statements during her interview with him).

The interview with Jones, while not disastrous or embarrassing for Kelly, still caused NBC execs a week of grief and handed control of the narrative to Jones. Still, Kelly is not nearly as easy on Jones as critics had perhaps anticipated in the 20-minute segment: she asked Jones about a scandal he had with yogurt maker Chobani, which he baselessly accused of being connected to both a rise in tuberculosis and the 2016 sexual assault of a child. “You don’t sound very sorry,” Kelly said to Jones when he told her he apologized to the yogurt-maker). “Do you consider yourself a journalist?” Kelly later asks Jones. “I'm just trying to figure out what the vetting process is.”

The interview predictably provoked outrage from fans of Jones and others on the right.

If the goal was to expose Jones, it only seemed to give him more oxygen. Jones provided his own counter-programming on Sunday night, watching Kelly’s show live and providing his own commentary for more than 100,000 viewers. NBC, meanwhile, appeared uninterested in giving the radioactive story a longer half-life than it had already generated, with the network doing less promotion for the interview than it did for Kelly's debut with Putin.

Kelly, who has sought to emulate Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey in the newsmagazine format, aimed for something revelatory with her second outing for NBC. “I find Alex Jones’s suggestion that Sandy Hook was ‘a hoax’ as personally revolting as every other rational person does,” she said in a formal statement before Sunday’s episode aired. “It left me, and many other Americans, asking the very question that prompted this interview: How does Jones, who trafficks in these outrageous conspiracy theories, have the respect of the president of the United States and a growing audience of millions?”

Jones didn't embarrass Kelly the same way alt-right personality Mike Cernovich did during his 60 Minutes interview with Scott Pelley in March—when the anchor seemed woefully unprepared to deal with pro-Trump media's version of reality—but whether the interview was worth NBC's week of grief is another question.

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