Transcript: DICK Cheney Interview with CNN’s John King – Cheney Says Obama Choices Create Risk

(Source: CNN)
Aired March 15, 2009 – 09:00   ET

JOHN KING, HOST: I’m John King, and this is our STATE OF THE UNION report for this Sunday, March 15th.

President Obama urges absolute confidence in the struggling economy, but can the country afford his ambitious plans? We’ll ask the former vice president, Dick Cheney, who joins us for his first television interview since leaving office.

Read more

Sanjay Gupta Would Be Another Inspired Pick

How about a U.S. Surgeon General who still practices neurosurgery from time to time, donates his time to worthy health-related causes around the world and has the media chops to liven up the staid post?  How about Dr. Sanjay Gupta?

Word out tonight is that the Obama team has approached the CNN star who was also a health care adviser to Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady.

I’ll be honest with you, I have no idea who currently holds the surgeon general’s post.  I’m not even going to expend the energy to look because whoever it is won’t be there in a month or two.

I remember Jocelyn Elders – I think she advocated something that the right wingers got all bent out of shape about.  I also remember C. Everett Koop, he was the guy who stood up to the cigarette industry.  I also remember that if you held a picture of Koop upside-down, it looked like Koop right-side up.

Read more

Kathy Griffin on Live TV: “I don’t go to your job and knock the dicks out of your mouth!”

Happy New Year from CNN:

Please, Not a CNN Wire Service

Unhappily, I read a story today on the New York Times website reporting that the venerable Associated Press is taking another hit – not from its member news organizations – but from CNN.  CNN wants to start a wire service.  Yikes.  I mean if you care about information over infotainment, yikes.

Fifteen or 20 years ago a CNN wire service wouldn’t have seemed so horrific.  Back then, they were full time in the news business.  Today, they’re in the Rick Dirty Sanchez Twitter My No Bull Keepin’ Em Honest flailing catch phrase business.  Of the major three cable networks, CNN airs more news programming on a daily basis, but there are still too many gimmicks and not enough 24-hour news.

CNN wants to leverage its relationships with TV stations around the country and the world to provide copy for the new wire service.  Double Yikes.  The average local TV news reporter or news director is newstarded.   In years of dealing with the media, give me a thoughtful print reporter or someone from the local NPR affiliate any day.

The problem with the Associated Press is that they are not adapting to the changing needs of their newspaper members.  Some of their recent policies, such as instructing bureaus to provide more enterprise reporting and less spot news, has them in hot water with the local papers.  See this post for more.

Finally, we have the newspaper editors.  There are quite a few major U.S. dailies who are now threatening or have already pulled the plug on their AP contracts.  Ben Marrison of the Columbus Dispatch is one of them and has been vocal in the pages of his own paper and now the New York Times.  Marrison is rightly indignant on behalf of his reporters who have had their enterprise stories thrown on the wire as if they are the work of AP staff.  He also has a legitimate negotiating point in the fees the AP charges its membership.

What I’d like to see from editors like Marrison is for them to fix their cooperative.  The AP is a cooperative after all.  Isn’t there a mechanism in the bylaws for a group of members to petition for change?  Is there not a mechanism – other than destroying the purest news organization we have – to hold the management of the cooperative accountable to its members?  I think part of the problem is that too many editors have become business managers first and newspersons second.

Marrison was in Atlanta to take a look at CNN’s wares.  Hopefully what he and other editors saw left them thinking more about reforming the AP and less about adopting the vacuousness and lax journalistic standards of TV news.

CNN failing us again …

All hell is breaking loose on the world’s financial markets. I figure that I should be able to turn on the King for some insightful guests tonight … maybe Hank Paulson, Robert Reich, Ben Stein, a financial services CEO or two. No. This isn’t news. This is infotainment! Larry’s guests tonight are: Donald Trump and Dave Ramsey! WTF? I do have to say I like Dave Ramsey, but getting advice on home finances is one thing. Tonight the country could use some macro-perspective, not celebrities. Why don’t we just have Rick Sanchez check his Twitter account to see what JimDandy2134 in Montana has to say?

UPDATE: Reich and Stein are going to appear … I stand by the above.  Who cares what Trump thinks?

Video: The longest four minutes of Tucker Bounds’ life … Courtesy of Campbell Brown

OK, I can’t take credit for finding this gem on my own.  Credit must go to Blogger Interrupted and Plunderbund for bringing this to the Ohiosphere earlier today.  It’s so good, it deserves to be duplicated again here.  Young Republican (looking at least) Campaign Spokesman Tucker Bounds (where do the Rs find these Southern Shit Slingers?) gets his talking-points-ass handed to him by Campbell Brown for the last 2/3 of this video. 

Now, this is no hatchet job from the supposedly liberal media.  Brown does what we all yell at our sets every night: “Make him answer your question!”

What’s Worse than Gustav? CNN’s Rick Sanchez Anchoring Coverage

Kudos to MSNBC

MSNBC, becoming more known for prison documentaries and visual talk radio, is actually covering the news today.  I’ve been looking in from time to time today on their hurricane coverage.  They appear to be the only network who had a reporter in Cuba to cover the hurricane.  The devastation and displacement of people is horrendous.  I hope decision-makers in the Gulf states and Washington have seen some of this coverage.

Brickbats to CNN

Guys this story is too serious for Rick Sanchez.  Sanchez proves every time he’s on the air that he’s the Ted Baxter of today.  One of his trademark moves is to get a guest talking and then loudly interrupt them about 15 seconds into what they’re saying.  He just did it to Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Russel L. Honore, the Ragin’ Cajun.  Honore, I believe, is calling in an airstrike on Sanchez’s position.  As I write this, Sanchez is checking in on Facebook to let us know what “Mark” from Somewhere in cyberspace thinks about everything.  Rick, there appears to be enough news today.  Put down the Facebook.  America doesn’t give a shit what “Mark” thinks.

See Also

Attention DNC: You’re Allowing Pundits to Steal Our Convention

OK, I swear I’ve been watching this convention coverage on CNN and MSNBC for three hours tonight and I’ve seen very little convention.  What I’m watching right now at 8:55 p.m. is Pat Buchanan and Rachel Maddow stoking the fires of Democratic discontent.

Forty-five minutes ago or so there was more pessimism from my hero James Carville.  It’s so obvious he’s still in the tank for Hillary.

Point being behind this post: DNC put up some damn programming worthy of these talking heads to shut the f*&k up!

“Liberal” Media Apparently Not in the Tank for Obama

Print and Electronic Media Making PUMAs Out to Be More Than What They Are

I get home from work, kiss the wife, pet the cat and check in on the Fourth Estate’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention.  I was shocked to find out that the floor fights have already begun, Hillary has chained herself to the podium, Bill is threatening self-immolation, and James Carville just decked Howard Dean.

That’s what one would think from the 4,793 headlines on Google News and a review of today’s transcripts of CNN’s coverage.  Every reporter in town is trying to find one of the two or three loud-mouthed, sore losers who are threatening to blow the place up.  CNN’s “Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzed began the program with a quote from James Carville suggesting that the Obama campaign has handled things all wrong — the transcript doesn’t point out when that sentence was uttered or in what context.

The vapid Ann Curry of NBC’s Today Show is the podium reporter tonight on MSNBC.  She literally pummeled poor Nancy Pelosi with questions about Hillary v. Barack.  Memo to Ann: This thing was won about four months ago.  Pelosi was straining so hard to smile through the barrage, she literally sweat Botox.

What’s missing from the media’s theme of discontent at the convention is — discontent.  I haven’t seen one party leader threatening insurrection.  I haven’t read one quote tonight from a party leader saying the situation is tenuous.  There are no signs of Hillary placards in the crowd among the delegates.

What the media may be missing in its attempt to create news is the real news.  Democrats are uniting in Denver this week.

Could someone shove ‘the big Twitter’ screen up CNN’s Rick Sanchez’s Ass?

Just when I forget what a dolt Rick Sanchez is, the weekend hits.

Sanchez is a former correspondent who did things like get himself tased, stand out in hurricanes, and simulate how to escape from a car underwater.  You know, news.

Now Sanchez is the CNN anchor at 10 p.m. EDT on the weekends.  His “newscasts” are difficult to focus on with his over-eagerness to hear himself shout and interrupt guests.  He also has an annoying habit of letting a guest say something and then restating it as a question.  He’s a dolt.

The latest shiny object on the CNN set which has captured Sanchez’s attention is the “big screen.”  He uses this thing to interrupt the normal flow of the show to let America know what the idiots at home have to say about the news.  This feature is brought to us via Twitter.  Sanchez acts as if Twitter is some sort of cutting edge technology, something I’m sure the kids who use it snicker about.

My question to CNN is: “Who cares what Frodo7235 has to say about the latest CNN electon poll?”

Will the pendulum ever swing back to where the news is information and not infotainment?  I don’t expect the news to be interactive.  I expect trained, educated, experienced journalists to gather the news and report within a standard of ethics and professionalism. 

CNN and others — leave the social networking on the Web.