Kasie Hunt Opens Up About Leaving MSNBC, Surviving Brain Surgery, and Her CNN+ Show
Kasie Hunt and Rebecca Kutler, Senior Vice President and Head of Programming for CNN+. Photo by T.J. Kirkpatrick for CNN.
“My parents don’t even have a cable subscription and I was a cable news anchor,” says Kasie Hunt, the latest high-profile journalist to make the jump from cable into streaming.
Hunt, who joined me on this week’s episode of The Interview, spent years as a cable news mainstay. Her linear career began with an internship at NBC News and culminated in an anchor gig on MSNBC. Last year, she left the network to join CNN+, the network’s ambitious subscription-based streaming platform.
Hunt is now a CNN anchor, chief national affairs analyst, and the host of The Source with Kasie Hunt, a daily politics show that launched with CNN+ last week and airs weekdays at 4 p.m. ET.
The program follows a format that might seem alien to cable news viewers accustomed to catching Hunt on MSNBC. Each episode runs 30 minutes, unencumbered by commercial breaks.
In its first few episodes, The Source has refreshingly avoided the partisan opinion drones that populate 24-hour cable news. Hunt hosts a panel of almost exclusively reporters — her first episode featured Abby Phillip and Jonathan Swan, among others — broken up by interviews with newsmakers like Sen. Mitt Romney.
“The show is a place where we hope viewers can come to get an essential take on politics,” Hunt says. “With the smartest, most plugged-in reporters, and people who are actually out there running campaigns and elections, not just people who have opinions on the Democratic or Republican Party.”
Hunt is one of several star journalists poached by CNN as part of a $250 million bet on streaming as the future of news. Chris Wallace joined from Fox News, his home of 18 years, while Audie Cornish joined from NPR.
But the months preceding the launch were tumultuous. In February, CNN’s all-powerful leader Jeff Zucker was ousted. I asked Hunt whether Zucker’s departure and the turmoil surrounding it made her worried about the success of the streaming service.
“In the months since then, it really has been full steam ahead,” Hunt said. She noted that Rebecca Kutler, the executive in charge of programming for CNN+, was responsible for her hiring.
“She really has been just such a driving force behind all of it,” Hunt said. “And none of that stopped just because of what happened.”
On a personal note, Hunt missed much of the drama swirling around Zucker’s defenestration (And Cuomo’s… and Gollust’s…) because while she was preparing for her CNN+ show, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
She underwent four hours of brain surgery to remove what turned out, thankfully, to be a benign tumor.
“I’m like 90, 95 percent, depending on the day,” Hunt said. “I regularly forget I’ve had brain surgery now. Honestly, many people who find a brain tumor the way I did, the outcome is different, or they find that when they take it out, it’s the beginning of a really long and difficult journey. And for me, because the tumor was benign, it was the end of something.”
“So I’m just very, very grateful for that.”
We also discussed how she plans to cover Washington D.C., how the political beat has changed since she led coverage of the 2012 Romney campaign for the Associated Press, and how journalists should report on Trump going forward.
Download the full episode here, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Read more coverage of The Interview on Mediaite.
