Kamala Harris has found her next TV interview forum—and she’s a friendly face.
MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle will interview Harris Wednesday night for the vice president’s first one-on-one network since she became the Democratic presidential nominee. The sit-down is the latest in a string of breakout moments for the MSNBC host, the host of The 11th Hour who has wafted between pressing President Joe Biden over his octogenarian status last year to defending Harris’ short-on-policy campaign last week.
The taped interview comes less than a week after Ruhle, also a senior business correspondent for NBC News, told New York Times columnist Bret Stephens in a spirited discussion on Real Time with Bill Maher. that Harris was “not running for perfect” and indicated the vice president provided a better alternative than former President Donald Trump.
“We have two choices,” Ruhle said. And so there are some things you might not know her answer to. And in 2024, unlike 2016, for a lot of the American people, we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is and the kind of threat he is to democracy.”
Ruhle, 48, broke into journalism in 2011 after nearly 15 years as a Wall Street banker when Bloomberg Television’s Andy Lack—later the head of NBC News—hired her as a co-anchor of its “Inside Track” program. “There’s someone on TV who really knows something,” Business Insider wrote after the announcement, highlighting her executive roles at Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, where Ruhle created the Global Markets Women’s Network. Ruhle had not done TV before, and she told InStyle she knew it’d be a challenge.
She made use of her Wall Street background after the pivot, breaking stories on JP Morgan’s massive trading loss in 2012 for Bloomberg and assailing the lack of opportunities for female traders who have kids in HuffPost.
After years on the beat—and an infamous interview where Donald Trump suggested George W. Bush was responsible for 9/11—Ruhle joined MSNBC, hosting everything from a daily news report to a weekly Saturday pow-wow with host Ali Velshi, titled Velshi & Ruhle.
Ruhle saw a step-up in status and stature at the network in 2022, when MSNBC President Rashida Jones replaced the abruptly departed Brian Williams with Ruhle as the host of The 11th Hour. Jones said Ruhle would be “bringing her business acumen, hard-hitting interview style and original reporting” to the network, slotting in a policy expert in primetime next to the block’s usual opinionated hosts.
Ruhle has been open about her struggles with dyslexia, telling the Today show—where she is a regular contributor on matters of personal finance, and an occasional stand-in co-host on the 3rd and 4th hours—her process involves compressing segment outlines with a Sharpie on index cards before her show regardless of her teleprompter.
“That prompter for me is not a roadmap,” she said. “It’s just a safety net.”Ruhle said her prep for an interview is similar, condensing dense subjects into shorter outlines. “We’re talking through it all the time. And I’m curious, right? All of us end up in these industries because we’re storytellers and we love people. And so that’s how I’m breaking things down.”
Ruhle’s decadelong success in media (she is also a former co-host of Weekend Today) hasn’t gone unblemished. Ruhle got flack in 2020 after she appeared in a six-minute video for JPMorgan Chase as part of its “Chase Chats” series. The clip, a conversation with ex-NBA star Jay Williams on personal finance, was briefly framed as a partnership by the bank, raising ethical concerns over a perceived conflict of interest between a journalist and a reporting subject. Ruhle was not paid for the clip, and the bank apologized in a statement to The Washington Post for the incorrect framing.
The host turned a different questionably ethical corner after The Wall Street Journal reported on an unusually close relationship between Ruhle and then-Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank between 2015 and 2016. Plank gave Ruhle a cell phone and email address solely dedicated to communications between the two, on which she’d receieve sensitive company documents and talking points intended to boost the company. Ruhle also flew on Plank’s private plane.
Ruhle admitted in a deposition the two were friends as she covered his comapny, and she wouldn’t clarify if she travelled with him in a personal or professional capacity. “I was flying on his plane as myself, Stephanie Ruhle,” she said, according to the Journal. “I’m not really in a category one or the other.”
It’s unclear what sectors Ruhle plans to focus on in her interview on Wednesday, though her questioning has the opportunity to put the Peacock brand back in the election playing field after NBC lost the prospect of a Harris-Trump debate to CNN this week.
