YouSaid · the spoken record

Kasie Hunt

lines on the record: 93
first: 2024-09-26
most recent: 2024-09-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In this job, like I just don't want to be that person. And I like to think that I wasn't before, but certainly I was tempted. And now I am not tempted at all.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And your relationship's in the business too. I mean, I have seen people really act poorly towards their colleagues as well. And I refuse to do that as well, even though there are definitely ways where sometimes being the worst person will get you ahead. Yeah.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, you know, I am now not, I am not someone who And in January 6th contributed this too because it kind of shattered my sense of the security of the system in which we all operate. So between that and having this health event, I just, my sort of sense of what matters the most and my willingness to let other people tell me what should be the most important thing to me is very limited now. Wow.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I could have cared less if I was ever on television ever again, right? Ever again. Didn't matter at all, but the idea that I wasn't going to like get to see him graduate from high school or be there if he came home because some kid bullied him on the playground and he was upset, right? Like I wasn't going to, that was the thing that really crystallized for me what matters. Now, I mean, I have, I was also very blessed to have had an incredible, like run professionally. Like I have done so much, I have accomplished so much. If I had been 18 when this had happened, I might have thought, man, like all of these things I wanted to do, I never get a chance to, right? I think that for the, you know, for different people, this can manifest in different ways in terms of showing you what is really the thing that is the most important to you.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't always get to, but now my son just started at like a real school, right? That gets out at 315, right? And I anchor an early morning show and I am trying my damnedest to be there most days to pick him up. Because like when I was staring all of this in the face, like I just spend the week before my brain surgery.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but it motivates people to do shitty stuff. Always knew that I never wanted to let myself do that, but I think that I Also, was swept up in it. And I just, I have trouble articulating it because I still think, and this experience underscored for me, like I think work is very important. And having work that is fulfilling to a person, you know, good, honest work is like an incredibly important value and part of like being a full human. I think that this environment, this town, this business can really warp what that means. And now I don't”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It changed me very fundamentally, actually. I feel incredibly blessed. I don't really talk very much about this, but I am actually a person of faith. And that this is something that happened to me when I was 36 years old because it gave me a chance to make sure that every single day I am doing the things that are the most important to me. Putting the right things in the right order. And I think it's really easy, and I think I was definitely guilty of doing it sometimes more often a lot, maybe even mostly, of thinking. And prioritizing things that don't matter, whether it's Know how you look to other people or whether you were Know, given the top slot on nightly news or bumped for someone who is the hotter currency of the moment with your network, I spent a lot of time caring about that kind of thing.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it really wasn't too much of a question. But then I never, after he told me that, after he said, this is not cancerous, this is benign, this is this thing. I never, I believed him from the get-go. My parents didn't. I think my parents were very nervous about the pathology report coming back after the surgery was finished and whether or not we were going to find out it was something like much worse. But for some reason, I never doubted him.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's this very specific type of tumor, it's a hemangioblastoma. And I think if I take it out, you'll get better. And the hardest thing about it, because it's so small, will be finding it and removing it, but that's my problem, not yours. And I was like, okay, we're going to do that, you know. And I think trying to figure out that, that's the thing. I don't know what it was. I wanted it out of my head.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I was like, okay, you think I have a cancerous brain tumor and you don't think I should take it out? And then I went to Penn and I'm incredibly lucky the CEO of Pen Medicine is the neighbor that we grew up across the street from and I grew up in a 1955 three-bed two bath split level American suburban house, right, with a whole bunch of other families like that. We all went to the local public elementary school down the street and Kevin Mahoney who runs Penn now was across the street grew up with his kids. And so he called their head of neurosurgery and Dr. Dan Yosher who looked at my scans and took it to the board that they have there. And he called me and he's like, I think I know what this is. And it was in much more with much more confidence than they had given me at Hopkins. He was like, I think.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He is also, of course, a journalist. He was like, You probably want to know what's going on in your head because the question then was should I have surgery to go in and remove this? Because again, it was a small, slow-growing thing. It's a little bit complicated, but I ended up at the University of Pennsylvania because no one had been able to figure out what this thing was from the scans, right? Like everybody was mystified. Johns Hopkins thought it was definitely cancer, that it was definitely glioblastoma. They didn't want to operate because if they did it was so small, the biggest challenge was going to be finding it and they didn't want to go in and not get it.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did that really happen to me? Yeah, it was I mean, I think there was a small part of me. It's funny one of the people that I called after I called the leadership CNN, one of whom... I think thought I was calling to tell her I was pregnant. I kind of, you know, I joked, yeah, I'd rather I'd really rather have a unplanned pregnancy than. Blen brain tumor, but it is what it is But Jeff Zucker put me in touch with Dr. Sanjay Kupta, who is a course a neurosurgeon. And I think one of the things I felt, and he vocalized this without my having to because.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I didn't actually find out that it was a tumor until after the deal. You know, at this point, I think, okay, I'm fine. I had found some medication that fixed the symptoms. I wasn't having the headaches anymore. I was figuring out how to live with whatever this was. I'm like, okay, I'm going to go do this. I'm going to take this new job. And then I went to get, you know, how like when you do change jobs, like you do all your things because you get your week off and you take all you do all your doctor's appointments. I get an MRI just to check on it. And then I started CNN and then I get a call while this thing is actually growing. That means it's definitely a tumor. That means we need to figure out what it is. So it was this very long process of...”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Skin check and mammogram and a CT scan of everything. They found no cancer anywhere. So at this point, we're like, okay, there's no cancer. We don't think it's not cancer that came from somewhere else and landed in your brain. And so they, at that point, we don't know what it is. It's so little. It's not changing. We're doing periodic scans. It could have been a vascular thing. It could have been, there are many things this little dot could have been, right? So like, okay, we're just going to, you're going to go about your life. It's not growing. It's not changing. We're going to monitor it. You're going to get MRIs every three months. I say, okay. And this at this point, I'm like, okay, well, I guess I could go to CNN. I guess I could make this big job switch because at this point it's summer and we're in the heat of these negotiations. And I had initially thought, well, I better just.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so strange, but that's how it happens. So no one ever said that to me. No one ever said cancer or it might be cancer or Anything like that. And so, you know, I'm going through this process. And initially, I'm very, you know, concerned about it, but basically There's no way to test. I had to look throughout the whole rest of my body because they looked at it and they were like, well, you're a young woman. Probably this is not in a place in the brain where it's likely to be glialastoma. What are the other cancers that you might have? You might have skin cancer, you might have breast cancer. So now we're going to check everywhere. It would have been great if my insurance company would have approved a PE.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they find something on the MRI, but they have no idea what it is, small, whatever it is. And so clearly someone thought it might be cancer because they eventually send me to an oncologist. And no one ever says, I don't know if you've had this experience in your life or a loved one. You've been with a loved one where the doctors know a lot more than they will tell you.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Yeah. So I started getting these headaches. I was anchoring an early morning show way too early right before morning Joe on MSNBC. And one day I was in my basement because it was COVID. So my studio was in my basement and the letters on the teleprompter started to swim, right? Like, if you've ever had a migraine, right? And that's what I thought it was because the other members of my family have migraines. And this was the winter, January, February, March, March, I think. And I went to see a neurologist about what I thought were migraines. And she said, yeah, that's probably what this is, but let's send you for a routine MRI. So I go for routine MRI. This is, you know, by now it's springtime.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's relevant to this because I had that surgery in October of that year. And so when CNN Plus collapsed, it was obviously a very difficult professional situation for me. But it was far from the worst thing that had happened to me in the previous 12 months.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, David, it's funny. So I was hired to go to CNN Plus in the summer of 2021, and I started in September at CNN. And we would be taken over the following April by Warner Brothers by discovery and become Warner Brothers Discovery. And three weeks after that happened, they canceled CNN Plus and the CNN Plus show had launched on March 29th. So just a week or so before the deal was closed. But just a few months earlier in October of 2021, I had discovered I had learned that I in the late summer, early fall, that I had a brain tumor. Right.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She is. And so that example, I think, helped me because MSNBC is part of the news gathering apparatus at NBC News. And again, it can be difficult for viewers and people on the outside to really understand this, but the NBC News gathering apparatus is different and distinct from the MSNBC hosts that do the shows, right? And so I always just tried to stick to kind of what my thing is, which is to try to figure out what was going on and bring sort of that new information to the table and try to figure out how to ultimately be myself while doing it, right?”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's tough. I mean, you know, I always, and I will give credit to, you know, in the partisan colleagues that I had at MSNBC for the most part were very generous and careful with me in terms of trying not to put me in positions where it would compromise my integrity as a reporter and my ability to build trusted relationships with people who believe different things and work for different sides of the aisle. So, you know, that sort of personal, like Rachel Maddow, for example, is kind of the avatar of, you know, MSNBC's liberal leanings. And she was always, in particular, very gracious and careful about this to say, you know, tell the viewers, like, Casey's a reporter. She's going to tell us what's going on. And then I'm going to talk to this other guest over here, or I'm going to tell you myself kind of what I think.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order to really believe it. Certainly I have started to think about like I am more skeptical of things I see printed on a screen than I probably ever have been because of the speed with which it's only going to get more challenged. And it's going to get worse.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I think we're moving into an era too where it's going to become more important with AI as much as the sort of old school version of journalism was to remove personality. And I think, I mean, admirably try to tell people what they needed to know so they could make up their own minds about what to do. Now, people are going to need like proof of life. They're going to need proof of human from... Where they're getting their news and their information.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These organizations. You know, I think I'd like to think that if Americans understood the way that we are taught, you know, and again, I came up at the AP originally, which is a very like throw that ball right over the middle of the plate kind of place, you know, don't write with personality. That was my biggest challenge, by the way, when I came from the wire to television was to figure out like, oh, okay, I can have a, they want you to have a personality when you're on TV, right? And I felt like I had been taught to take my personality out of it.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It makes it feel impossible sometimes. And I think this is the thing that we all wrestle with, that there's not necessarily a good answer to, which is that when you're trying to reflect and tell people what's going on, when you're trying to tell people something that's not true, you have to tell them what the thing was that was said that wasn't true in the first place, right? And so you end up in this world where people are consuming things in such fragmented little pieces. And where the leaders of the country”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's all on tape, right? I mean, the speech is on tape, and he says he wants to go down to the capital with that. I mean, this is the thing, and this is the other piece of why being a political reporter is so different now than it was when I started that there are just so many people who believe things that are refuted with things that they can see with their own eyes. Well, it does.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The election from being certified, right? So, you know, it's a, I have very complicated feelings about it, and it's still something I think about a lot.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I went up there that day, I sent a text message when I was driving in in the car. I was looking around on my way in. I didn't drive my own car because I didn't want to park it. We knew there were going to be protests and the car would have been parked like right in the middle of what ended up being this riot. So I didn't drive my car. I like took an Uber or whatever. And I texted my husband, I said, you know, this feels like something about this feels very tense, right? Like off. Like I don't feel, I don't have a good feeling about this. And he wrote back and he said, well, you'll be fine once you get inside the building. And that was really the thing, right? Like there was this perception in Washington. Like, you're always kind of prepared, like we could be a target for a terrorist attack. People flew planes in the Twin Towers that we talked about, right? But if there was going to be an attack, if something bad was going to happen because I went to work at the Capitol building with the people that run our government, it was going to be because some foreign terrorist organization or some adversary did something horrible. It wasn't going to be because there were a mob of my own countrymen who came down the mall and smashed the windows and bear sprayed the cops to try to stop.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a bump in the road or two, but it comes, and no one came for hours, for hours. I mean, I remember calling at one point, too, that like, The planning for it, like we were more surprised than we should have been by it. I mean, when I say we at the time, I was at NBC, so I can only provide that window.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“January 6th, I am very transparent on the air when I talk about it that I had a personal experience there and I am going to be reflecting the personal experience that I had when I talk about it and when I am covering it, those cops, the police officers that got beaten up, I mean, they were there protecting me and all, you know, and our democracy, right? And it shook my faith in the whole enterprise. And it made me wonder things that I hadn't really wondered before about kind of where the lines were, what was acceptable, what was possible. And I think the thing that I think back on the most is that is the hours where no one came, right? It's like you think that something like that happens. There's an emergency, right? Somebody calls 911, like the ambulance arrives, right? And it's America, right? The ambulance shows up. Maybe there's maybe...”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Officers were there. I mean, I spent a lot of my career, and I mean, as you know, like trying to figure out how to be fair as you do this job is one of the most important things.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, absolutely. All power draws all sorts of terrible people to it. That is true. But that doesn't mean that there aren't good ones here, too. And I, you know, those are the people that I was trying to seek out. And they exist of all stripes, right? They believe all sorts of different things. They don't all agree with each other, but hopefully they are united by this thread of common decency. And that has been a thing that has really been very challenging in recent years because the level of the expectation of decency has changed quite a bit. And I think January 6th really shook me because, I mean, it obviously has all sorts of implications, and I have to cover these every day as a political reporter on our democracy and all of that. But really, I mean, this was an attack on the place where I worked. And there were a lot of people that I cared about a lot who were there that day and who were in danger that day.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you for saying that, yeah, because look, I mean, and this is part of what honestly what January 6th has meant for me is it sort of shook this about me, which is that I came here as a pretty idealistic, patriotic person, right, who very much believes in America and American democracy and being able to play a small role in it as, you know, in this case a member of the press, which I'm allowed to do because of our system of government, right? And I have always believed, and I do still believe this, that there are a lot of really good people who come to Washington because they want to do good things and they care about the country. They care about their neighbors. Does that mean that there are not, the town does not have its share of like hangers on and lunatics and selfish charlatans, exactly?”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, and yeah, I mean, the hill, and I love Capitol Hill. I really do. We talked about how part of what I wanted to do here was to be part of it, of our collective national life. And the hill is just such a central part of it.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once I started doing television, it's like I'd be on the plane for stretches and then we'd drop off, we do our nightly live shot. I used to do what I call the Walmart parking lot test, right? Where you like drive to the local Walmart and just start asking people if they'll talk to you because at least then you're getting a random sample of voters. It works better in a state like New Hampshire where everybody's super engaged than it does in states where the whole campaign is on TV. But it's a really, it's a more interesting way to kind of get a cross-section because when you're interviewing people at events, a lot of them have been organized to be there.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, well, and the other thing about being on the plane is that oftentimes the only voters you're exposed to are the voters that the campaign wants you to talk to because the ones that are at a lot of their events are ones that are their organizing team has identified and brought, right? They're like already supporters of the candidate. So it can be really tough. Right. Find people, one of the things I started doing as a TV correspondent because, you know, or whenever I had an opportunity where I wasn't on the plane, because when you're a TV correspondent, you're on and off the plane a little bit more. When I was a wire reporter, I was on the plane the entire time, like for the duration, right? I got on the plane. They drove me everywhere. I got off the plane where they said, et cetera.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They did. And he had to rewrite his speech in real time. And after he gave the rewritten concession speech that he hadn't written ahead of time, he got in the motorcade with the Secret Service. We drove to his house. We dropped him off. And instead of the cars that would normally have waited there overnight, we all drove away and he was left with no. It was really, really remarkable.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was there till the very end. I dropped him off in the motorcade. I was the AP reporter at his house in Massachusetts after his concession event at a party where I think all of us reporters in the room thought knew he was going to lose the election. They did not think that they were going to lose the election. I remember, yeah.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you're staying at the same hotels, you're eating the same crappy food, you're dealing with the same crises, you're like awake for the same amount of crazy hours, right? And you're doing it all together. So you have to figure out the right balance between being a part of that and making sure that you are stepping back, looking at it like someone who's on the outside and applying a critical eye. And then the other thing I would also say, you know, this short version is that you should never forget that it's human beings. The candidate is a human being, the people that work for the candidates are human beings. And when something bad happens, like they lose an election, like you should treat it like they're human beings.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You go first. Okay. I think that my main piece of advice would be to always be trying to look beyond what the campaign wants you to see. Because every day they are putting on a show for you. And everything, literally everything down to the way that they have wrapped the plane and the name cards on the seats, right? It's all, everything matters. All of it matters. And so that would be my main thing. And I think it's very easy, especially when you are, it's very hard when you are someone on the plane because you are part of a community of people. You're part of a community of reporters, of campaign aides. You know, you are all in it together to a certain extent in a way that the rest of the world just isn't.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, and so I just wasn't ready for what they needed because, you know, and now I have a better understanding of how that happened. And certainly there are things I would have done differently. But that said, you know, I did try to learn from those and rely on what I did know, which was I knew how to report, knew how to write. I knew how to move information quickly. I knew what was important and what wasn't. And I just needed to figure out how to do the mechanics of making sure that information was transmitted in a different way. And so it took a while. I became the NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent four years later in, because I went to NBC in the winter of 2013 after the 2012 campaign. And after I finished covering the 2016 campaign is when I went back up to the hill as an NBC news correspondent. So it took me four years.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I was just trying to do what I could to contribute what I could to the network. And, you know, I had mistakes, right? I did a live shot on weekend today's show and everything about it was wrong, right? The tracking on the piece was not very good. The writing was okay. I was a writer by trade. The writing was fine. But I wore a dress that had leather accents and sparkly eyeshadow on a Saturday morning. And the producers watched it and they were like, no. Yeah, I ran into the same problem, actually.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was a reporter. I forget my title was Off Air Reporter and Producer. And I worked in the Senate. I was based in the Senate. And I worked quite closely. I'm with Kelly O'Donnell, who was the Capitol Hill correspondent at the time, who is an incredible human being.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he introduced me to Brian Williams, who was anchoring the nightly news at the convention that year. And, you know, they sort of courted me and Antoine ended up in a powerful position and he hired me to work at the network. And, you know, I didn't realize what I was getting into because the job that I initially had there was not a full-time on-air job. I had to fight for that once I got in the door. And it was not easy. And it would have been very easy for that to have ended in a way that was not successful for me. And I feel like very lucky. Now knowing what I, understanding what I didn't know about television when I walked in those doors, I'm a little bit floored that I didn't wind out. What were you doing?”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like that. And I said, Well, I didn't realize that that was like an option, you know, and he said, well, like that was, you know, I saw your live shot. I thought, wow, okay. And they're obviously from there were some, you know, various bumps in the road, but this bureau chief, Antoine San Fuentes was his name, he ended up working at CNN eventually. Yeah, I know.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so basically how it happened was I did one of these TV hits, it was my birthday, and I forget which year, but I think it was, it must have been a presidential year. It must have been 2012, it was 2012. And so the anchor had seen that it was my birthday, I'm assuming in political playbook or something like that, and wish me happy birthday on the air. And so I sort of lit up and said, oh, thank you, you know, like have a good nice day. And so the bureau chief at the time at NBC, this was an MSNBC live shot, sent an assistant up to get me from the little flash camera box and said, you know, bring me down to his office. And so I sit down in his office and I'm like kind of why am I here? He says like, you know, I saw your live shot. Have you ever thought about being a TV correspond?”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you're stuck in one place and you're fighting with these people over the same sort of scraps of information. It's tough. And I admire people who do it, but it wasn't for me. I mean, the thing is, you know,”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. 535 people who were just dying to talk to you. It's honestly, I'm biased, but I have done stints at the White House. I have done stints at the White House that are just long enough for me to realize that I never wanted to be a White House. Let me just say, and I was, you know, I worked.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that said, I mean, the same sort of drive that I have to try to break news, find the news is kind of what led me to TV because I quickly learned that when your sources see you on TV and you say something, if they're usually when they're unhappy, sometimes when they're happy, but they'll call you when you get off the air. And they'll tell you something you didn't know, right? And so I kind of figured out the power of that. And then I ultimately figured out that you can do it beforehand, right? You can use your TV hit as an excuse to call all of your sources and say, hey, I'm going to go talk about this on television, right? And they've got the TV on and the White House offices or their, you know, Capitol Hill office and they're like, oh, you're going to talk about my boss. Well, let me tell you, like, here's what you should say. Another way to learn new stuff.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was something that I wanted to do. It wasn't something that Well, I guess I should say it wasn't something I didn't want to do. It was never something that I thought was a possibility because typically the old school way that you would become a TV journalist is to go work in local TV news and kind of work your way up through the various markets. And I'm like, I hadn't done that, right? And I didn't want to do that. I liked covering Washington. I wanted to be in the thick of things.”
2024-09-26 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 595 — Kasie Hunt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source