If only Santa Claus were a homeless child.

Fox News host Megyn Kelly sparked outrage this week after insisting that Santa and Jesus were white:

KELLY: By the way, for the kids at home, Santa just is white but this person is arguing that maybe we should also have a black Santa. Santa is what he is and we are debating this because someone wrote about it.

Those controversial comments came in reference to a thought-provoking post penned by Slate columnist Aisha Harris that appeared under the headline “Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore.” Harris' piece is worth reading.

In short, she explains the confusion she faced as a child reconciling the ubiquitous images of a white Santa Claus with the one she experienced in her own neighborhood, where Santa Claus was black. It's a compelling take on the way media images and iconic cultural touchstones can marginalize:

I remember feeling slightly ashamed that our black Santa wasn't the “real thing.” Because when you're a kid and you're inundated with the imagery of a pale seasonal visitor--and you notice that even some black families decorate their houses with white Santas--you're likely to accept the consensus view, despite your parents' noble intentions.

In an increasingly pluralistic society, Harris asks, shouldn't our seasonal icon be more representative of society?

It's worth asking why it is so important to Megyn Kelly that her audience (and the children she imagines are watching The Kelly File) maintain their conceptualization of Santa Claus as a white man. It's not as if Harris concluded that Santa should be a black woman. She proposed replacing Santa with a penguin.

Kelly helped cut her teeth at Fox as a member of Bill O'Reilly's culture warriors. In that context, her comments help explain the culture she is helping to defend: her own.

At the very least, Kelly's reaction to a non-white Santa demonstrates a troubling lack of empathy, but it is an empathy deficit that is becoming a pattern with Kelly, who went to great pains to portray herself as a non-ideological, serious reporter when she took over a primetime show.

Kelly has received some credit for speaking “truth to power” inside the Fox News bubble, in part getting accolades for aggressively challenging two of her male colleagues after they criticized female breadwinners as symptomatic of what is wrong with America in the 21^st century. And there is no doubt that Kelly deserved credit for using her position of power to reject misogyny.

But her record of using that position of power to defend non-majority populations is sketchy when it comes to experiences outside her own. 

After Kelly pushed back on one of her guests on Fox for referring to maternity leave as “a racket,” Jon Stewart skewered her for having previously dismissed society's interest in making sure that workers have a basic level of benefits. Stewart demonstrated that Kelly's position on the danger of entitlements being “baked in the cake” was at odds with her newfound defense of workers being entitled to maternity leave.

In other words, the empathy deficit remained. It's just that Kelly's own culture now included maternity leave.   

Kelly's warfare on behalf of her own culture taps into broader power dynamics that are at play throughout the media. As Media Matters has documented, broadcast and cable news is disproportionately the home of white men. And particularly in the arena of nightly television news, it is the dominion of highly paid elites who have the ability to set the agenda.

So it's important to look at the stories that don't get covered.

Megyn Kelly's rejection of a non-white Santa was one of 13 references to Santa Claus on major cable or broadcast news programs that night, according to Nexis. And the reasoning behind her discussion, Kelly explained on air, was that “somebody wrote about it.”

The same justification could have been given for a discussion about homeless children. Yet by contrast, there were three references to homelessness that night. One of those came from a Fox host complaining that a Duck Dynasty star had been mistaken for a homeless person at a Caribbean hotel.

None of those segments told the story of Dasani, an adolescent homeless girl who formed the center of "Invisible Child," a New York Times expose by Andrea Elliot on homelessness in New York City running this week. According to Nexis, Dasani's story was the focus of only a single segment during evening and primetime news this week.

The piece, which detailed systematic failures that make it nearly impossible for the 22,000 homeless children in New York City to climb out of abject poverty, barely caused a ripple among elite media.

The most visceral reaction came from the editorial page of the New York Post, which essentially told homeless children to shut up and enjoy the rat-infested shelters we give them.

It is one thing for the Post to be doing what the Post does, but it was the only conversation sparked by Elliott's devastating look into the reality of homelessness. Faced with that media reality, what is the incentive for Dasani to tell her story?

That silence speaks to the same power dynamics that lead non-ideological primetime hosts to declare that Santa is white. Any minority children ostracized by that fiction need to just get over it -- their cultures don't have enough warriors fighting on their behalf.