OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Top-rated podcaster Megyn Kelly did not spare her score for Fox Sports over the way the network introduced the first lady during the NFC Championship Game on Sunday as she sat next to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
The network introduced her as “Dr. Jill Biden,” which is technically accurate because she has a Ph.D. in education. But Kelly ripped her for being a “wannabe” for not having a “real” degree and for “insisting on this fake title,” the New York Post reported.
Biden and Goodell were seated at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, where the Eagles decisively defeated the San Francisco 49ers to advance to Super Bowl LVII when the television network’s graphics introduced her as “Dr. Jill Biden — First Lady of the United States.”
“Announcers for this Eagles-49ers game just spotted the First Lady in a box and of course call her ‘Dr. Jill Biden,’” Kelly tweeted. “Wonder if she realizes what a wannabe she looks like insisting on this fake title.”
The podcaster added: “Get a real MD or just work on your self-esteem.”
Announcers for this Eagles-49ers game just spotted the First Lady in a box and of course call her “Dr. Jill Biden.” Wonder if she realizes what a wannabe she looks like insisting on this fake title. Get a real MD or just work on your self-esteem.
— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) January 29, 2023
The Post noted further:
In 2007, Jill Biden earned a doctorate of education from the University of Delaware. When her husband, President Biden, served as Barack Obama’s vice president, Jill Biden taught English full-time at Northern Virginia Community College.
Jill Biden’s insistence on using the honorific even though she’s not a physician triggered widespread debate about which PhD recipients should be called “doctor.”
The Wall Street Journal published a widely-discussed op-ed in December 2020 by Joseph Epstein who chided the first lady and urged her to ditch the title “which feels fraudulent, even comic.”
“Epstein wrote that Biden’s doctorate of education, which she received after submitting a dissertation titled ‘Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs,’ was a sign that ‘the prestige of honorary doctorates has declined even further,'” The Post noted, adding that Epstein, a now-former lecturer at Northwestern University, had his name wiped from the institution following backlash to his op-ed.
“Northwestern is firmly committed to equity, diversity and inclusion, and strongly disagrees with Mr. Epstein’s misogynistic views,” the school said at the time of the English professor.
The university also noted he “was never a tenured professor at NU and has not been a lecturer here since 2002.”
Recently, Kelly also took CNN to task after the flagging network decided to pick up her former Fox News colleague Chris Wallace and make him a part of the shortlived CNN+ streaming network.
“Who is the moron at CNN who actually thought, ‘you know what we need with our ratings in the toilet?’ More of us. We need more CNN. I do love all of the jokes about how while Elon [Musk] is offering to buy Twitter for tens of billions, there are lots of people out there right now who are willing to buy CNN+ for tens of dollars,” Buck Sexton, who used to be a CNN contributor, said of the streaming service at the time in an interview with Kelly.
Then the topic of CNN+ hiring former “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace was mentioned, and Kelly tore into him.
“He was in last place every week, every year, every month. He was always in last, and they still paid him,” she said. Then she said when she was at Fox News, she received an offer from Zucker and CNN.
“I considered going to CNN. CNN made me a huge offer. Huge,” she said, eventually landing at NBC for a time.
“I said no, Buck, because I knew: who is my fanbase going to be over there? I knew who my fans were and I knew that my Fox viewers were not going to follow me to CNN and that the CNN viewers were going to hate my guts,” she said, adding that she believed Wallace was “suffering from that very problem right now.”
CNN’s ratings have been in the toilet for years, falling farther behind Fox News and liberal rival MSNBC.
