Greta Van Susteren read my Kimberly Guilfoyle column on Friday, and she had notes.
My column covered Guilfoyle’s rise from cable news host to Ambassador to Greece, and her eventual ouster over self-evident character issues. I knew her from my time at Mediaite, which I wrote about: “On-air talent have often cozied up to Mediaite writers and editors on the theory that it would get them better coverage.”
Greta posted screenshots and wrote, “just for the record, I never cozied up to Mediaite writers and editors to get ‘better coverage’ and in fact, always politely declined every invitation to every event I got from Mediaite.” Then a second post, objecting to a word in another sentence: “The cable news talent racket is a small world in which most people know one another, for better and worse.” She has been in the business 31 years, she wrote, covering disasters, wars, politics and sports, and before that she was a successful lawyer. “I have never considered my career a ‘racket’- perhaps writing about it from the sidelines is a ‘racket’.”
I’ll give her the second one. It was a figure of speech about the business, not a verdict on her career, and her career isn’t a racket. Greta Van Susteren is a household name for anyone who watches too much cable news, and for good reason. She is one of the very few people to have hosted shows on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. These days she holds down the anchor desk at Newsmax, where she does a full and thorough review of the news that doesn’t always go where some of her opinion-hour colleagues there go on Trump.
I’ll mostly give her the first one too. She never played the cozy game the way plenty of others did. The exception is the one weekend she and I went at it, via emails over Mediaite’s ratings coverage.
Some background on the ratings beat, because it explains the fight. Covering cable news ratings at Mediaite was a challenging and strange job. Fox News has forever won nearly every hour nearly every night, and you cannot write “Fox News won again” five nights a week. That simply isn’t news. So instead we focused on ratings trends, shows gaining or losing viewers, and networks having unusually good or bad nights. Fox News didn’t always care for that approach. They’d much rather we’d written about how great they were, which we did, but there are only so many times you can write it.
On December 9, 2011, my old pal Nando Di Fino, who was quite ably covering the cable news ratings beat, wrote up the Thursday numbers under the headline “Thursday Ratings: Anderson Cooper Flies High At 10.” Cooper had pulled 258,000 viewers in the 25-to-54 demo at 10 PM, almost as many as Lawrence O’Donnell and Joy Behar combined, and Nando facetiously called him a “ratings monster*,” with the asterisk explained at the bottom: “*-Non-Fox News Division.” It was a good joke! It was also a concession, in the same keystroke. Classic Nando! But of course, Greta had 409,000 in the demo that hour. Both full ratings tables ran with the post, with her name at the top of the 10 PM row in each.
The next morning Greta was having her coffee and scanning the websites, by her own account, when she saw the headline. She went to her blog on Fox News’s website and wrote her own blog post headlined “Silly headlines? You have to wonder if Mediaite is on CNN’s payroll.”
“It looks like Mediate can’t count or they are getting paid by CNN or are in some weird love affair with CNN…or perhaps a drunken Christmas Party posting?” she wrote. “There must be something cozy going between Mediate’s reporter and CNN.” What bothered her most was that the post mentioned Hannity and O’Reilly by name and “fails to mention ON THE RECORD at 10pm at all.” The article, she wrote, “seems to want to make ON THE RECORD at 10pm invisible.”
She made a fair point, and it’s worth being precise about which one. In total viewers, the number she used, On the Record had 1,571,000 that Thursday, O’Donnell had 843,000 and Cooper had 711,000, so Cooper was third. In the demo, the number Nando used, Cooper was second, to her. Mediaite could count; the numbers in her post match the numbers in ours. But the story itself named O’Reilly and Hannity and never named her. She won the hour, the tables said so, and the prose didn’t. If I’d been her, I’d have been annoyed too.
What she was not entitled to do was suggest my staff was on CNN’s payroll or drunk, and I told her so. I emailed her that afternoon and said that if she had an issue with the story, she might have emailed me before questioning our editorial integrity in public. She wrote back that she wasn’t seeking to make friends. “Journalism is not about being buddy,” she wrote. “It is about facts and good judgment.”
Then she wrote again. I “might want to think about the path of former mediaite staff to cnn...how many so far?” She’d been tipped off to that story, she said, and had ignored it. “I am not looking for a war.”
I pushed back, hard, and told her that if she wanted a fight, we’d happily point out what we knew too. She had just accused my staff, on a Fox News website, of being bought.
Her next email asked whether I wanted to call a truce. “Do you want to have a cup of coffee and sort out our differences?” Then a final one: email is a lousy way to communicate, call me, I’m always game to talk these matters through.
I never called. It felt unsound, and I absolutely hated hearing from on-air talent or discussing coverage. We were arguing about how we covered her show, and I didn’t think the answer should come out of a coffee with the host.
So when she says she never cozied up to anybody for better coverage, she’s mostly right. That December weekend she fought. Wanting the headline was fair. Telling her viewers a trade site might be on CNN’s payroll, or drunk, because a story about her hour didn’t say her name, and then privately suggesting there might be a story in where our staff went to work next, is something else.
For those still reading, that’s the very definition of a cable news host leaning on a newsroom for better coverage.
And when leaning didn’t get her anywhere, she offered coffee with the managing editor, in the middle of a fight over how we covered her show. That part is the cozy game, whatever she’d call it now. It’s a long way from what Kimberly Guilfoyle did, and at the time Greta said she was standing up for her staff of 12. It was still working the press.
It didn’t work either. That was the point of the Guilfoyle column, and it still is.
In 2011 she was sure there was “something cozy going” between a Mediaite reporter and CNN. Fifteen years later she’s offended at the suggestion that anyone like her ever got cozy with us.
We never did have that coffee.