democracynow | Cenk, welcome to Democracy Now! What happened?
CENK UYGUR: Well, it’s exactly as I explained on The Young Turks.
You know, I was going along doing a program. You know, they did have,
early on, some stylistic comments. I was trying to listen to them, you
know, in terms of body language—don’t wave your arms, act like a
senator. I don’t know why you would want a talk show host to act like a
senator, but fine, it’s the medium that you’re working in. If I’m
working on the internet, you know, it’s different than working on
television. And, you know, taking those points is no problem at all.
But in April, when they pulled me in, Phil
Griffin gave me this big speech about how we’re the establishment, and
it would be cool to be like outsiders, but we’re not, we’re insiders,
and we have to act like it. And I remember thinking at the time, well,
there’s no way I’m going to do that. So I’m going to give them what I
got. And then, if they like it, they like it. If they don’t, they don’t.
And honestly, I didn’t know which way they
were going to go with it, because I know how much they care about
ratings. So I figured if I delivered good ratings, that that would
probably do the job. Well, it didn’t, because I delivered really good
ratings, beating CNN significantly, handily,
and also improving upon the numbers from last year. So there’s no
question about the ratings. And then they pulled me in and said, "Well,
you know, we’re going to go in a different direction at 6:00 anyway."
And when I asked them about it, they didn’t really have a good answer as
to why, leading me to believe that that giant conversation we had three
months ago might have been part of the reason.
AMY GOODMAN: In December of last year, Phil Donahue joined Eliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker on their show to discuss his ouster from MSNBC during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Donahue was the lone journalist daring to publicly oppose the war at its onset.
PHIL DONAHUE: I opposed the war.
ELIOT SPITZER: And was that one of the reasons they pushed you off?
PHIL DONAHUE: Oh, read the memo—
ELIOT SPITZER: Right, right.
PHIL DONAHUE: —published by the New York Times.
ELIOT SPITZER: So, your—
PHIL DONAHUE: "Donahue’s antiwar voice is not going to work against the flag waving on the other station." Donahue and any antiwar voice in 2002—
ELIOT SPITZER: Right, right.
PHIL DONAHUE: Remember, they’re all doing what I did then now.
ELIOT SPITZER: Right.
PHIL DONAHUE: I mean, the whole channel is now.
KATHLEEN PARKER: But listen—
PHIL DONAHUE: You could not criticize this war four months before the invasion.
ELIOT SPITZER: Right.
PHIL DONAHUE: It was not good for business. You had—General Electric had no interest in featuring an old talk show host who was against the president’s war. It was—it was unpopular. You weren’t American. This is what you get with corporate media. It’s going to happen again.
AMY GOODMAN:
Cenk Uygur, does your situation compare to that of Phil Donahue’s? Do
you think Al Sharpton would take a very different political line than
you would?
CENK UYGUR: So, there’s a couple of different things here. First of all, it’s not just Phil Donahue. I had Jesse Ventura on The Young Turks a little while ago, maybe over a year ago. And what people don’t remember is that he also had a big contract from MSNBC
at the time to do a show, and they told him, "You know what? It’s OK.
Take the money. You don’t even have to do the show." Why? He said they
found out that he was against the Iraq War and said, "That’s OK. We
don’t want you on air then." OK?
And Ashleigh Banfield, when she gave a great
speech in Kansas about how the war didn’t make any sense, she went from
their star reporter to literally being moved into a closet. And they
wouldn’t even let her out of her contract so she can go on another
network and talk. It was unbelievable.
Now, the distinction there is Donahue, Ventura, Banfield were all under different management at MSNBC.
So you have to be clear on that, and you can’t put that on them. But
the similarity is that it is corporate media, right? And whether it’s
the pressure to go right, the pressure to go left, pressure to appease
the Bush administration, or pressure to appease the Obama
administration, it exists. And it’s not just MSNBC. You think that the CNN
hosts can aggressively challenge government officials? I don’t think
so. It doesn’t look that way at all. And of course, when you get to Fox
News, they’re a whole different animal: they’re purely propaganda. So,
to me, this is not an issue of just MSNBC management now, no.
