[oldembed src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aHgM8SUAwy8?rel=0" width="425" height="319" resize="1" fid="21"]
I can understand why he's leaving (because hitting your head against a brick wall does lose its appeal after a while) but I'm sorry that one of the more questioning voices in cable news will be gone. Whether you approved of him or not, he asked a lot of the tough questions:
Dylan Ratigan, the opinionated and sometimes hotheaded television host, is leaving MSNBC, the cable channel where he has worked for the last three years.
Mr. Ratigan, whose news analysis show is now broadcast at 4 p.m. Eastern time, said in a telephone interview that he was electing to leave cable so that he could put into practice what he has talked about on TV. Mr. Ratigan has attacked political systems, corporations and special interests on his show and promoted movements for job creation, bank reform and campaign finance reform in the past.
“Once you’ve said your piece, you can either keep saying it — and then it’s a job, good job, pays well, everybody knows your name, it’s great — or you can decide what you’re going to do about it,” he said. “And the answer is, I don’t know. But I do know, in order to figure it out, I have to dismount.”
On MSNBC, Mr. Ratigan will be replaced by the man whose show precedes his at 3 p.m., Martin Bashir. MSNBC staff members were told of the changes on Sunday afternoon after a reporter inquired about the plan.
[...] It’s an atypical end to an atypical show. Mr. Ratigan came to MSNBC from CNBC, where he hosted a stock-picking show called “Fast Money” until early 2009. Since his abrupt departure from that show, he has changed quite a bit. He has spoken out against too-big-to-fail banks and the politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, who he says are poisonously allied with those banks and other special interests. He has pushed his guests to talk about political and economic solutions rather than just problems.
In doing so, he has acted as a crusader of sorts, challenging cable news norms — and sometimes sticking out from the rest of MSNBC’s daily schedule.
Cable news, he said Sunday, “is designed to argue about rules and resources, and who should control them,” especially in an election year. That’s an argument that he’s no longer interested in having, he implied, though he went out of his way to thank MSNBC and NBC News.
And here's what Ratigan has to say for himself.
