Dylan Ratigan opens up about his media diet in The Atlantic this week. The MSNBC host starts his morning with visits to Twitter and several online news sources and says he “wouldn’t read a newspaper now unless you put a gun to my head, and even then I would really try to negotiate with you.” Ratigan then gets on the phone with his staff, who fills him in on anything he may have missed:
That combination of news puts me in a situation where I can differentiate between what’s actually happening and the blowhard news cycle of fear-monger manipulation and self-indulgent garbage. For instance, you hear a lot of talk on the debt ceiling about how disastrous it’s going to be. The nice thing about having access to the financial markets is you can see how full of crap the political media is.
Ratigan also discusses the stigma of being a cable news host, saying it’s not his job to pick political sides:
One of my great frustrations with working in cable news is that the entire cable news infrastructure has been branded through partisan political lenses and so people assume that if you’re on MSNBC you’re left and if you’re on Fox News you’re right. There’s no question that I’m painted as left because of the network I’m on. The branding precedes the talent in cable networking.