Thursday, April 26, 2018

Stephanie Ruhle Breaks The First Rule Of Pundit Club


You don't talk about Pundit Club (h/t Alert reader and good guy WW for calling this to my attention.)

Specifically, Ms. Ruhle seems to have stumbled across one, small facet of the worst kept secret at MSNBC -- that her fellow Comcast employee, Hugh Hewitt, is an android sent from the future to destroy America.


So shocked was she by this discovery that she went right on her teevee show and did what any normal, decent human being would do. She asked Mr. Hewitt, "Hey, Hugh, WTF is up with you being a big sack of soulless douchery?"


Now as we all know, the Great Compact of 2009 --
Voices From Above Silence a Cable TV Feud

By BRIAN STELTER

JULY 31, 2009

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC Bill O'Reilly of the Fox News Channel regularly trade swipes at each other on their cable news shows. It was a media cage fight, televised every weeknight at 8 p.m. But the match was halted when the blood started to spray executives in the high-priced seats.
For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.

It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to help bring it to at least a temporary end.

At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.

Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.

In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).

“It was time to grow up,” a senior employee of one of the companies said...
-- went by the boards long ago once the sheer savagery and depravity of Trump State Teevee's daily assault on the basic principles of civil society (along with the number of heavy hitters there who have been cashiered for being sexual predators) made ignoring it simply impossible.  

But other than the occasional pantomime eye roll and gamma-ray shade from colleagues at Hugh Hewitt's gleeful contempt for the truth --


-- I cannot recall a case where one Comcast employee plainly called out another Comcast employee for being, y'know, fucking awful.

Check your phone, Mr. Hewitt.  The calls are coming from inside the house.


Behold, a Tip Jar!

6 comments:

Brewlord said...

Mr.Ruhle? Do you know something we don't know?

Dave McCarthy said...

One more reason to LOVE Stephanie Ruhle!

bill said...

In the typical cable "news program block", the viewers' incredulity is twanged, stretched and plucked like a Jimi Hendrix Stratocaster. Without proper BSPF shitscreen, (eleventy?) bodies absorb dangerous levels of big and little lies, verbal cleverties and shill-speak, to the point that nothing makes it through to form cogency beyond "They're all nucking futz!"

At the end of each block, its host(s) thank the viewers for playing the game and invites them to stay tuned for further enlightenment.

bill said...

On a housekeeping note: Your site has become radioactive. Ad-block notes 35 blocked elements. The spambots LIVE!

driftglass said...

bill,

I get the same read on my site. 17 ads blocked. Thing is, I have zero ads on my site, so I think adblocker is reading YouTube and/or Tweet embeds as ads, which is annoying but outside of my control.

BW said...

Ruhle has been consistently great on the tax bill, but still does her share of "bothsiderism" when called on. But for an all too brief moment she called out one of MSNBC's worst. Congrats to Stephanie. I hope this brand of honesty becomes more frequent.