![](http://cdn.crooksandliars.com/files/movieimages/2010/12/19204.jpg)
Megyn Kelly got all worked up yesterday over Leo Laurence's piece outlining an initiative by the Society of Professional Journalists' Diversity Committee to, as they put it, "engage in a yearlong educational campaign designed to inform and sensitize journalists as to the best language to use when writing and reporting on people of different cultures and backgrounds". (Notably, Kelly makes it sound as though this were some kind of active campaign, when in fact, as the SPJ notes, "The committee itself has taken no official initiative on the use of the phrase 'illegal immigrant.' ")
So she brought in GOP operative Brad Blakeman and Jehmu Green from the Women's Media Center to engage in a classic Fox 'fair and balanced' debate in which the host and the right-wing guest get to run roughshod on the token 'liberal'. You could pretty much figure where Kelly was coming from when she lobbed this softball to Blakeman:
Kelly: How far could you take this? You could say that a burglar is an unauthorized visitor. You know, you could say that a rapist is a non-consensual sex partner which, obviously, would be considered offensive to the victims of those crimes.
Hey, nothing like a classic "fair and balanced" analogy to make the segment complete, eh? Memo to Megyn Kelly: You're comparing violent criminal acts to a civil misdemeanor, which is what having undocumented status is. (More on that in a moment.)
Obviously Kelly was quite enamored with the analogy, because she returned to it with Green:
Kelly: What if there was a push by the criminal defense... bar to re-brand the use of the word rapist to nonconsensual sex partner?
Finally, she wrapped it all up in a bow with one of the dumbest comparisons of 2010:
Kelly: You know, we did a segment earlier in the year on how little people find the term midget offensive, and so you can't say that anymore. There's so many words that are suddenly becoming hurtful, and part of the group thinks it's hurtful, and the other group doesn't, and you're left as a journalist saying, I don't know what to do.
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/megyn-kelly-compares-immigrants-rapi