Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly did her part Wednesday to hype Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) attack on the Obama administration over the flight ban to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, but she didn’t quite have her facts straight.
“Did the Obama administration just pick a side in the Israeli-Palestinian war, and was it the wrong one?” Kelly asked, in what was a splendid example of how the anchor maintains a vague air of objectivity while still clearly upholding Fox’s agenda.
Kelly, who has insisted in the past that she’s “not a political person,” then went on to explain why conservatives like Cruz are suspicious of the Federal Aviation Administration’s extension of its ban on U.S. flights to Tel Aviv.
“The ban was extended despite the fact that there is no similar ban in place on flights over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen — not even one over Ukraine, where a commercial airliner was just shot down,” Kelly said.
You probably would have heard something about the absence of such a ban in Ukraine last week, when a Malaysian jetliner was shot down and nearly 300 people were killed. Instead, the crash brought confirmation that the FAA had in fact prohibited U.S.-based airlines from flying over the airspace where the plane was shot down.
Here’s the notice of that ban, which the FAA issued in April.
Watch video of Kelly’s error, via Media Matters:
