Radar Online has published a pretty equal-opportunity attack on the television pundits who are most hated by the insiders who have to work with them. A lot of names on the list are those you would expect (namely Bill O’Reilly, whose incredible and quite vulgar Inside Edition era flip-out and its various musical remixes are the stuff of YouTube legend). Other well-known tools profiled are Olbermann and Matthews.
The name I didn’t expect to find on the Pain in the Ass (PITA) list was Laura Ingraham. I listen to her radio show on WNTP. She comes across as amiable if a little emphatic and occasionally shrieky.
Radar Online get a little dirt on Ingraham via insiders from MSNBC (she had a show there back in the late 90s) and FOX News.
“I’ve worked on a half-dozen programs at three different networks, and Laura was by far the most difficult person I encountered,” moans a former producer of her short-lived MSNBC program, Watch It! “Which is unfortunate, ’cause she’s actually pretty smart.” Evidence of just how difficult working with Ingraham can be was made public last week, after a 10-minute video of her chastising her staff not to “come in my ear” and ranting about a mysterious Mexican person was released on the Internet. (Watch it above.) “What you see in that video was pretty typical of her interactions with her staff,” says a P.A. on the O’Reilly Factor, where Ingraham routinely stops by to bloviate. “Part of the problem is that she’s very tough on herself, so when she doesn’t understand something, or, say, sees something wrong on the prompter, she flips out,” says the former producer. “You knew to just keep your head down leading up to commercials. Producing her was more an exercise in trying to walk her down off the edge.” Not that anyone has to worry about doing that for the time being: Just In, her new show on Fox News, was canceled after just three weeks.
This video, apparently leaked by disgruntled FOX News colleagues, is a 9-minute treasure trove of snottyness.
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FOX News, Laura Ingraham, Punditry, WNTP-AMRelated Posts
2 Responses to “Laura Ingraham: PITA”
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1edit35 on Jul 22, 2008 at 1:50 pm:
Wasn’t Ingraham just filling in for another Fox host the past three weeks, during the 5 o’clock houor, or something like that?
I didn’t realize she had her own show.
[Reply]
2Steven on Jul 22, 2008 at 2:19 pm:
It depends on who you talk to. The show did have its own name (”Just In”), and was started at a time when Ingraham’s contract talks with her current radio syndication had stalled. She has said it was not intended to be a long-term thing. Other have called it a “try out.” Radar says the show was cancelled.
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