Is Megyn Kelly the "sane one" over at Fox News? That is what a reporter for TIME Magazine wanted to know during an interview with the cable news star. Kelly, whose show has been rising at the network, sat down with TIME writer Phillip Elliott for an interview when he raised an old Bill Maher quote, Kelly reacted in her typical straightforward manner.

Last summer Bill Maher made a joke about you. “We think Megyn Kelly is the sane one over there at Fox News. That’s because she’s surrounded by [Sean] Hannity and [Bill] O’Reilly. She’s the blonde girl on 'Game of Thrones.' Everyone else is a zombie or a dwarf or sleeping with their sister,” a paraphrase there, “so she looks normal.” Do you ever get nervous when you look around your network?

Nervous? No. I don’t understand the question.

Elliott tried to suggest that the journalistic credibility of people like O'Reilly and Hannity is questionable:

Do you worry about the network’s reputation?

No. Nor do I think a criticism from a man who refers to women as the c-word should wind up in a TIME piece. You’re putting yourself out there if you want to use that.

I think Fox News is just like any news organization in that we have editorial and we have news. There is nobody who would mistake Bret Baier or Bill Hemmer or Shep Smith or yours truly for Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. And I think Bill and Sean get so much attention is because it’s very rare to have strong conservatives on TV, even in today’s day and age. And they are an anomaly still, even after the Fox News Channel has been in existence for going on 20 years.

You know, would you ask that question of Savannah Guthrie, you know, when she was doing the 9 a.m. over on MSNBC? We’re not MSNBC. But nobody ever asks that when the commentators are left-leaning. We get that at Fox because the right-leaning commentators are a problem for certain reporters, and they feel the need to ask straight news journalists whether they want to be associated with that. In my view, that is your bias talking. That says nothing about Fox or me.

Elliott then tried to get Kelly to react to being viewed as the Fox host most loved by liberals, something she shot down as being irrelevant, saying that she takes viewers from all sides and doesn't care if they watch because they love her and her guests or hate them all.

The full piece can be read here.

Kelly is a rising star at Fox. Her 9 p.m. show is consistently one of the highest-rated on the network. It drew 2.3 million people last Wednesday.