(The shooter in Pittsburgh, according to early and possibly unreliable reporting, is so far right that he turned against Trump after Charlottesville because he thought Trump didn’t speak up to defend the neo-Nazis against antifa. It’s said the guy was obsessed with the “caravan is coming” propaganda on Fox News, and he blamed Jews and George Soros for the caravan. Again, though, this isn’t corroborated and might be wrong.)

Megyn Kelly is now officially bounced from NBC. We might reflect on how stupid it was to hire her in the first place. Erik Wemple writes,

Kelly left Fox News for NBC News with a considerable incentive in the form of a $69 million contract over three years. That would be nearly $900,000 per bi-weekly paycheck, before taxes, insurance and whatnot.

There are many problems with this pay level. One is connection: How is a person from the top 0.01 percentsupposed to promulgate coverage that’s in touch with the needs of the poor or even the middle class? When she was hired to her NBC News spot, Kelly was supposed to participate in political coverage now and then. Was she supposed to speak about the anger of the economically displaced with a straight face?

Next is priorities: How many top-tier investigative journalists could NBC News pay with $23 million a year? At $200,000 per year, it could afford 115 such journalists. With such a crew, perhaps the network wouldn’t have needed any investigation into a fumbled Weinstein story.

Of course, network news is all about ratings and advertising revenue, not news reporting, which is one reason Donald Trump is president now. According to Wemple, the fellow who hired Kelly was Andy Lack. Lack also has a history of protecting employees accused of sexual harassment, such as Matt Lauer, and he caught the blame for NBC’s killing Ronan Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein, which Farrow then took elsewhere.

Lack claimed he was hiring Kelly because she was such a great journalist, which she isn’t. She’s a bobblehead. Lack possibly believed that Kelly’s audience from Fox News would follow her to NBC, but they didn’t. Wemple wrote a couple of days ago,

Fox News is the “plug-in” network, as this blog has often called it. The genius of Ailes and Rupert Murdoch was to create a programming conceit targeting an entire population of Americans, a conceit that spread across the network’s lineup. Loyalty goes more to the brand, the channel, than to this-or-that anchor. That’s why Kelly didn’t bring her audience with her to NBC News.

It’s also the case that she was a bad fit for NBC. Wemple continued,

While Kelly did indeed conduct many excellent interviews at Fox News, she also — as has been widely noted again in the aftermath of her blackface comments — turned in racially offensive work, including the well-publicized comments about Jesus and Santa (they’re white, kids!), the hyping of voter-intimidation charges against members of the New Black Panther Party and other moments. With the support of her colleagues and Ailes, Kelly had no trouble weathering the outcries that followed these moments.

On the other hand: Had any of those instances occurred under the roof of NBC News, the backlash would have resembled what we’ve witnessed this week. Colleagues would have rage-tweeted; management would have scrambled; apologies would have streamed from the organization. Maybe NBC News executives determined that those Fox News scandals were aberrations, that Kelly wouldn’t pack those sensibilities with her when she moved into her office at NBC News. Whatever the case, they made a mistake. “I didn’t focus on what the Fox sensibility is versus what the NBC News sensibility is,” Lack said after Kelly’s hiring. “I did want to know that I thought she would fit into the NBC culture.”

She clearly did not.

As I have ranted here in the past, most of the people who end up being Masters of the Universe didn’t get there by being exceptionally smart or talented. They got there by being aggressive, by shrewd networking, by being at the right place at the right time. Andy Lack screwed up, big time, by hiring her. Will NBC do anything about that?

Helaine Olen writes at WaPo,

The news of Kelly’s rather extraordinary payday, for what can charitably be deemed a subpar performance, comes the same week the New York Times discovered that Andy Rubin, a high-level executive at Google and the creator of the Android operating system, received a staggering $90 million exit package when he was shown the door in 2014 following credible allegations of sexual misconduct.

The Android operating system is a big deal, but is it a $90 million golden parachute big deal? How is it that one can rise to a position in which one is rewarded by truckloads of money even when one screws up?

There are, it’s fair to say, a lot of things that are eating away at American society at the moment. But one thing that doesn’t get the attention it deserves is how the wealthy and powerful get chance after chance and, even when they fail, get to exit on a generously padded slide — while the rest of us, on the other hand, too often live precarious lives, one lost job away from financial disaster.

Well, yeah. When the Megyn Kellys and Andy Rubins soak up vast sums of money for being a mediocre hack and overentitled technoweenie, respectively, that’s money not being used to expand the company or compensate the cube farm workers who actually keep the place going.

We see this time and time again in American life. CEOs exit with absurdly generous golden parachutes no matter how dreadful their performance, while the employees they downsize or fire receive scraps. Sometimes the situations are all but absurd. At Wells Fargo, former CEO John Stumpf retired with more than $100 million in retirement benefits, apparently a reward for pushing sales goals so intense, the only way many employees could meet them was by opening fake accounts for unwitting customers.

The whistleblowers who attempted to report the scam over the years, on the other hand, were frequently shown the door. In at least one case, Wells Fargo initially refused to hire one former employee back even after ordered to do so by the Department of Labor, and only reached a confidential settlement with the woman in the face of sustained media attention.

And people wonder why the young folks are taking an interest in socialism.

The situation carries over into other areas. In 2008, the banks famously got bailed out, while millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. A 2016 report by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for Effective Government found that even as Fortune 500 companies froze pension plans for the vast majority of their workforce, they did no such thing for the men and women in charge, who continued to be offered access to defined benefit packages for retirement.

Then there is Donald Trump, who has skated from bankruptcy to bankruptcy even as he’s stiffed everyone from creditors to small contractors. One reason for this rather stunning track record? Many of those who lent him money decided they would lose less on the deal if they kept him in business. He was too big to fail — at least permanently.

In a sane universe, Donald Trump would have been left penniless in the 1990s and today would be a used car salesman living in a trailer. See also Following Trump’s money exposes the awful truth: Our president is a ‘financial vampire’.

Seems to me these practices are not just bad for their companies; they are bad for the overall economy. At the very least we need much more regulation of executive compensation. No CEO is worth the money they arrange to pay themselves.