In a powerful podcast interview, seasoned journalist Greta Van Susteren, who is now a host with conservative-leaning cable network Newsmax, spoke with independent journalist Tara Palmeri and, during the interview on Palmeri’s podcast, exposed how MSNBC was falling apart, as shown by its attempts to silence its journalists.
As background, Van Susteren is a career journalist who has worked for CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and Newsmax. She worked for Comcast-owned MSNBC for merely five and a half months in 2016, and was then let go in a decision that reportedly surprised her. Speaking about the matter on Palmeri’s podcast in an interview that was released on March 17, Van Susteren explained how MSNBC was the only network that tried to direct what she could and couldn’t say.
Van Susteren’s comments on the matter came when Palmeri asked her about why she believes there is a persistent leftist bias inside newsrooms, at least from her experience in cable news. Palmeri asked, “So, from your experience being inside, do you think that there was a leftist bias inside the newsroom?”
Responding, Van Susteren explained that both the somewhat conservative-leaning FNC and the left-leaning CNN never tried to control what she said. Explaining as much, she told Palmeri: “Well, first of all, I only knew the one narrow niche, which was the English. I have no idea what everybody else was saying. Nobody told me what to say or do while I was there. Nobody told me what to say or do at CNN, Fox.”
Joking with her, Palmeri said that they “wouldn’t dare.” Doing so, she interjected, “They wouldn’t dare. Come on, Greta. What? They wouldn’t dare with you.” Responding, Van Susteren explained that while those outlets didn’t dare, MSNBC did, and that’s why she got fired. Beginning that explanation, she said, “Well, no, but that’s why I got fired at MSNBC.”
Continuing, she noted that MSNBC was very different in doing that, as over the other nearly two decades she spent in the news business, no one else acted like that. She said, “After I’d been at CNN and Fox and then MSNBC tried to tell me what to do, I almost thought they were joking because … I had like a 15- or 18-year career in the news business and nobody ever told me [what to do].”
Concluding on that point, Van Susteren noted that her firing came because she wouldn’t “play ball” with MSNBC on saying things she didn’t think or believe, as the network wanted her to do. She said, “So that’s why I got fired at MSNBC because they said I needed to play ball and I thought, you know, that didn’t work.”
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Posting on X about her experience at MSNBC and her interaction with notoriously far-left actor Mark Ruffalo on March 21, a few after the interview with Palmeri and around when that interview started taking off online, Van Susteren noted that Ruffalo had tried to get her fired from the woke network. She explained, “These are sort of fun….this Hollywood actor wanted MSNBC to fire me…in the end, all is good for me, but he should have had the courage to meet with me and have coffee. I would have been polite. We might even have ended up enjoying each other’s company.”
That came as a caption on a picture of an old tweet from February of 2019 in which she called out Ruffalo, saying, “When is @MarkRuffalo who has said nasty things about me going to sit down with me over coffee or a beer and talk about our respective civil rights work and humanitarian work? I keep asking…”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video