Katie f'n Phang!

[Celerity]

47. "... [O]bviously my departure from MSNBC, mainstream media, traditional legacy media... clearly, it wasn't linked to the

Charlie Kirk stuff, because I left MS as of May 1st. But it was linked to this idea of having corporate oligarchs and corporate overlords that were overly concerned about your tone and about your content.

And it really was a direct result of, after Trump taking office, the FCC Chair, Brendan Carr, as y'all will remember, he was sending threatening letters to NBC, ABC, CBS, the parent companies, Comcast, Paramount, et cetera, Disney, um, saying, 'Look, I need to know all of the details about your DEI policies. I need to know everything about your woke policies and programs.'

I mean, he made it very clear that he was going to do stuff like he just did in that CBS-Paramount settlement where, not only was it, you know, the $15-16 million dollars, but if you'll recall, for that merger between Skydance and Paramount, now there's a 'ombudsman,' a monitor, that looks at the programming to make sure that it's, quote, fair, and we all know what that means, right? ...

So, for me to be able to be in independent media, like we are here ... we have to be able to speak unabashedly and frame things in the truth. And part of that is saying the hard things out loud. Talking about these executive orders, and saying that it is in the pursuit of cleansing this country of minorities. I could not have gotten away with saying that if I was on mainstream media, Mike. I would have gotten in a lot of trouble. I was already getting into trouble with some of the things I was saying about convicted felon Donald Trump."

Popok said, "I'll say it, since you're not going to: Everybody that got canned from MSNBC was a person of color... Why is it only the Asian and Black people that end up being shown the door?" Phang said, "I think it's more about tone, about attitude, about forcefulness, urgency, exigency of messaging...and again that was the coincidence of who we were, our backgrounds, our races, et cetera."