That's the blunt headline atop Marisa Guthrie's tough-minded and well-researched story on CNBC's Dylan Ratigan in today's Broadcasting & Cable.
Or should it be Dylan RAT-igan? Guthrie (pictured above) reports, you decide:
On Friday morning’s edition of The Call, CNBC correspondent Melissa Francis, who was reporting on frenzied gasoline trading from NYMEX, asked Ratigan: “Is it as crazy on your exchange as it is here?”
Ratigan’s comeback: “I think if I was blond and beautiful I could draw a big crowd.”
Francis, visibly irked, responded: “That’s not what it is all about.”
As Guthrie observes, such pig-talk is part of a pattern at CNBC. Speaking of Ratigan, she writes, "He's been doing his best lately to alienate female viewers." She continues, "Sadly, such comments are hardly atypical from Ratigan and his band of merry he-men." Here's another one:
Thursday on Fast Money – CNBC’s signature market broadcast which was recently shifted to the high-profile 5 p.m. time slot to coincide with the close of the markets – Ratigan and Fast Money contributors Jeff Macke and Karen Finerman were discussing the upcoming auction season and Finerman’s adoration of investor Carl Icahn.
Finerman apparently bought a painting of Icahn at auction, paying several hundred thousand dollars for it. (Finerman can afford it. She runs a multimillion dollar hedge fund). Icahn joined the conversation via phone – and that’s when Macke took the discussion down several notches by suggesting that Finerman would have paid considerably more for a naked portrait of Icahn.
“She would have gone $2 million for a nude, Carl,” said Macke.
To which Icahn responded: “I would have bid that for (Finerman).”
After more back and forth about Finerman’s crush, Ratigan closed by thanking Icahn for “playing with us.”
But it's CNBC, and the liberals are rallying around CNBC--when they can. But we might wonder: What if these exact same words had been uttered on the Fox Business Channel? In that case, you can bet that Media Matters and all the other liberal pressure groups would have been all over this story.
But it wasn't Fox, it was CNBC, and so only a few gutsy reporters, such as Guthrie, are chasing after the story.
