MSNBC's Tamron Hall to reporter: 'You're not going to come on and insult me'

MSNBC's Tamron Hall sternly lectured Washington Examiner's Tim Carney on air Friday afternoon for refusing to answer questions about presumptive Republican nominee former Gov. Mitt Romney (MA) lashing out at a Colorado reporter's question about medical marijuana.

Hall invited Carney to discuss the incident, but the Examiner reporter didn't go with the premise of the question, responding, "What you're doing here is a typical media trick. You hype up a story, and then you justify the second-day coverage by saying, 'Oh, well, people are talking about it. Here's how Romney responded to it.' No. Let's move on to substantive issues."

Hall cut him off, saying, "You knew what we were going to ask you. You didn't have to accept the invitation to come on." She went on to tell him to wait because "you're kind of in my house here."

Carney fired back, "What you're bringing up here is a meta story. 'What is the Romney response to this other non-story?' I'm trying to go meta meta on you and say, here's some media treatment."

"You're actually irritating me right now, I'm going to be honest with you," Hall quipped, pointing out that she was asking Carney about Romeny's response to not only the Colorado questions, but also a Washington Post story that reported he bullied a fellow student in prep school and his response to Obama's endorsement of same sex marriage. "You're not going to come on and insult me. You're not going to come on and insult the network. You knew what you were going to talk about. Done."

Hall then abruptly ended the interview while muting Carney's mic, saying to the segment's other guest, MSNBC contributor Jimmy Williams, "I greatly appreciate you joining me. I would do the same for Tim but we have to be able to have conversations and not do hit jobs when we know we're guests on the show. Thank you both," she said.

Carney immediately took to Twitter, protesting, "So that's the first time a TV host cut off my mic. Best part: when she put me back on camera at the end to yell at me while I had a dead mic." He added the hashtag "#metameta" to a tweet that linked to the Examiner'scoverage of the incident.

Carney's push to move to "substantive" issues in response to the marijuana question echoes Romney's own response to the marijuana question, "Aren’t there issues of significance that you’d like to talk about?"

Watch the video, below, first aired by MCNBC on May 11, 2012.

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(h/t Think Progress)