Outgoing HillTV Hosts Dish on Corporate Media: ‘Why Do We Have to Put Up With Sh*t Like That?’

Rudy TakalaJun 7th, 2021, 1:40 pm
 

Former HillTV hosts Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball dished on the relationship between advertisers and corporate media in an interview over the weekend.

The duo abruptly announced they were leaving The Hill last month to start their own podcast, Breaking Point. They described some of the reasons leading to the move in an interview on Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper’s podcast, Useful Idiots.

“If … you don’t pull your punches where certain corporations and powerful entities are concerned, at a certain point, it becomes a little unsustainable to be in corporate media critiquing corporate media,” Ball noted. “The Hill takes money out from all kinds of different advertisers, you know, everybody from Koch Industries to American Petroleum Institute, which was always really uncomfortable.”

Enjeti provided specific examples of what Ball described, but said he blamed the advertisers — and the nature of corporate media — rather his former employer. “It’s not The Hill’s fault,” Enjeti said. “Their job is to be a Beltway media outlet.”

At one point, he said staff for House Financial Services Chair Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and for  called his employer to complain that he threatened her life:

I did a segment where … I said Maxine Waters will be the chair of the Financial Services Committee until the day she dies,” Enjeti noted. “This is an objective fact. Well, her … staff calls the boss of The Hill and said I issued a death threat against Maxine Waters. I sh*t you not. They said I was threatening her life. They don’t call me. They call your boss’ boss and they start threatening all kinds of sh*t.

And here’s the thing. Maxine Waters — she’s the chair of the Financial Services Committee, and Hill Reporters need to be able to talk to her. So they know exactly who to threaten, and, like, work the strings, and ‘Oh, maybe we’re not going to appear.’

“I’ve got a year or two years of grievances,” Enjeti added, before disclosing that TikTok deployed the same complaint against him as Waters — on behalf of a staffer for former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI):

Another one is TikTok. For a while, I was doing segments and reporting on Republicans, specifically, lobbyists, who were former Paul Ryan Staffers and others who were going to go work for TikTok. All public knowledge, their bios were all on LinkedIn … So I tweeted it out. ‘Oh, another Paul Ryan staffer going to work for a de facto Chinese government company.’ I did a monologue on it. TikTok calls up The Hill and is like, ‘He’s issuing death threats and unleashing harassments.’ And again, I’m like, ‘F*ck you.’ I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s called reporting. Don’t work for a Chinese company if you don’t want scrutiny.

“I was afraid because, at the time, The Hill was taking advertisements from Huawei, a Chinese telecom company,” Enjeti said. “And I was like, sh*t, man, what if TikTok starts advertising? You know what I mean? So all of these are just examples of, look, if it’s even in the back of my mind that I can’t do reporting on TikTok, or say whatever I want about Maxine Waters or any other powerful politician, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have to least think about it.”

He also took aim at “petty” rules about who he could invite on his show for fear it would somehow undermine viewership. Addressing Halper, Enjeti said:

You used to come on our show all the time. Is it not an additive thing where we add to you, you add to us? We rise together. It’s called the internet. It’s actually not a discrete resource. Welcome to the year 1999. Trying to explain this was maddening. It was the dumbest thing. It was such a petty way to try to control our public image, our brand, how we appeared in public. And I’m looking at Matt and you out here saying whatever the hell you want, and I’m like, why do I have to put up with this sh*t? 

Watch above via Useful Idiots.

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