"Honorable gentlemen"

If you can't play nice with the "honorable gentlemen" they don't want you in their club.

Uygur often refused to treat members of the political and media establishment with deference and respect. He didn't politely imply with disguised subtleties when he thought a politician or media figure was lying or corrupt, but instead said it outright. In interviews, he was sometimes unusually aggressive with leading Washington figures, subjecting them to civil though hostile treatment to which they were plainly unaccustomed. As Uygur put it in explaining last night why he rejected MSNBC's offer to stay on:

I said on the air that most politicians are corrupt. And I remember, my guest was like: "What - how can you say that? These are honorable gentlemen" [laughter] I am not going to do a show where I pretend that most of the politicians in Washington are honorable gentlemen. Hell no.

Uygur explained that, several months ago, he was summoned to a meeting with MSNBC boss Phil Griffin and told that while it is fun and enjoyable to be an "outsider," that is not what MSNBC is for. Instead, Griffin told him, MSNBC is "part of the establishment," and Uygur must conduct himself in accordance with that reality. It's perfectly fine in establishment discourse to express contempt for one of the two political parties. It's equally fine to periodically criticize your own. But what is most assuredly not fine -- particularly in a high-profile nighttime spot and without having a real power base that comes from mammoth ratings -- is to be aggressively adversarial to the political establishment itself and the financial interests that fund, own and control that political system. That is what Uygur was, and while there's no evidence that this was the primary cause of his removal, it was clearly a serious source of dissatisfaction with the station's executives, including MSNBC's chief.