But, she said, “It gives him a national platform — a much bigger platform than he’s had in the media before — which serves to recruit new supporters to his cause and tell people
that there are conspiracy theories out there they might not be aware of.”
In the end, she said, “People like me are going to have to deal with the fallout.”
Ms. Hockley said that Mr. Jones’s embrace of the fiction
that Sandy Hook was a hoax has led to harassment campaigns and even death threats against her and others who lost children and loved ones in the massacre, which is just sickening.
The broader goal of Ms. Kelly’s segment on Mr. Jones, she said, was to explore, “his influence
and his — for lack of a better term — method for putting information together to figure out how he got to be so important in the president’s world, in millions of people’s world, and do some probing on his process.”
Ms. Kelly said her demeanor with Mr. Jones — including the photo in the car — was in part to get him to talk, but not to do so without challenge.
“I hear what Megyn is saying about journalistic integrity — you have to expose the unsavory parts as well so
that people understand them,” said Nicole Hockley, a founder of Sandy Hook Promise, whose son Dylan, 6, was killed in the massacre.
“As journalists, we don’t get to interview only the good guys — that’s not journalism,” Ms. Kelly said.