Category: CNN

CNN’s Toobin on May 31: ‘What Andrew Breitbart Was Insinuating About [Weiner] With Young Girls Is Outrageous’

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There’s no possible way Breitbart could be right, right, right, while CNN’s “senior legal analyst” was wrong, wrong, wrong — or is there?

“This is a silly little thing that happened”? “Not a big deal”? Yeah, idiot: Tell that to the cops who just interviewed the teenage girl in Delaware!

Maybe some of the numbskulls at CNN should go read what “senior legal analyst” Ace of Spades has to say tonight — Ace doesn’t have a network contract, but he’s been right, right, right all along.

UPDATE: Jennifer Preston of the New York Times actually has a pretty solid story about the latest development:

Representative Anthony D. Weiner said on Friday that he had exchanged at least five private messages on Twitter this spring with a 17-year-old Delaware girl who became an admirer of his after hearing him speak during a high school trip to Washington.
Mr. Weiner’s spokeswoman, Risa Heller, did not provide copies of the messages, but said they were not inappropriate.
“According to Congressman Weiner, his communications with this person were neither explicit nor indecent,” Ms. Heller said.
A member of the girl’s family who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her identity characterized the messages as “harmless” but expressed concern that Mr. Weiner had communicated privately with the teenager, a high school junior.
The family was aware that there had been exchanges between Mr. Weiner and the girl but assumed that all of their conversations had taken place on a public Twitter feed. Then a scandal erupted last month over a photo Mr. Weiner sent of himself in his underwear to a college student.
Last week, Mr. Weiner acknowledged that he had sent other explicit photos and messages to at least six women he met over social media.
The family member said: “I am angry. This is surreal and unbelievable. It is absolutely crazy. We are just regular people who go to baseball games and basketball games, as ordinary and plain as can be.”
In the past few days, the girl and her family have become subjects of intense interest in the news media. On Friday afternoon, the local police arrived at their home and asked the girl and her mother to bring the girl’s phone and computer to the police station so they could be checked to make sure no crime had occurred.
The family member said the family complied, and did not expect any further action to be taken.

The important thing here is: Weiner admits he sent this teenage girl “at least five” DMs.

Does the phrase “grooming” ring a bell?

OK, that last sentence was probably not what you’d call responsible, professional, ethical journalism. But I have sources I could contact, experts in such matters, and I’m reasonably sure that if they were to take a long, hard look at the available evidence here, their responses would include something like the phrase “warning flags.” Here is Weiner, recklessly cybersexing with complete strangers, sending photos of his junk to people he’s never met — clearly driven by some sort of wild sexual compulsion — and this man is sending DMs to teenagers?

Like I said: “Warning flags.”

Finally, Weiner Calls the Police!

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No, he didn’t ask the cops to start an investigation of the insidious hackers who stole his crotch-photo and Tweeted it to a 21-year-old. But when a reporter for WCBS-TV in New York started asking questions . . .

Weiner’s Office Calls The Police
After CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer
Asks For An Interview

As you can imagine, Ace of Spades has loads of fun with this news. Meanwhile, CNN’s Jack Cafferty is asking another question: Can Weiner survive this scandal?

Dan Collins at Piece of Work in Progress has an excellent round-up of today’s WeinerGate news and commentary. And by “excellent,” of course, I mean: He linked me.

UPDATE: Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg see — what else? — a vast conspiracy!

Scott Whitlock has the transcript at NewsBusters.

UPDATE II: Linked by If You Seek Peace — thanks!

UPDATE III: Linked by Nice Deb — thanks! — and this story is now the top thread on Memeorandum.

VIDEO: Michael Moore Tells Americans How to Be Good Americans — Like Him!

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Question: If it weren’t for the fact that it plays 24/7 in airport waiting areas, would anyone ever watch CNN? Not me. Sometimes I switch over to MSNBC for kicks, but I never watch CNN.

So anyway, Piers Morgan had Michael Moore on Thursday night, so that he could give the rest of America (or at least the part of America stuck watching CNN in airports) a lecture about what it really means to be a Good American:

I was raised in an Irish Catholic home. I believe in those principles that I was raised with. I hear a lot of people in this country often say, what would Jesus do? I don’t think Jesus would go down to Ground Zero like a lot of people did on that — on Sunday night with champagne bottles and pop corks and have a party. . . .
And I think — I think, look, like I said, I’m glad he’s gone. But I just feel something has — we’ve lost something of our soul here in this country. And maybe I’m just an old school American who believes in our American judicial system. Something that separates us from other parts, other countries where we say everybody has their day in court no matter how bad of a person, no matter what piece of scum they are, they have a right to a trial. . . .
We are at a point now where we don’t — ‘what do we need a trial for, just get rid of him.’ The second you say that, you’re saying that you hate being an American. You hate what we stand for, you hate what our constitution stands for.We stand for something different than that and we’re better than them. We don’t just operate in an uncivilized way the way they did on 9/11. We operate in a moral way. . . .
You know we should be standing up and saying, ‘listen, damn it, we’re Americans. This is the way we do it. You commit a crime, we put you on trial. That’s the way it works here.’ . . .

It’s amazing, isn’t it? He tries to play the Jesus card, then he tries to play the patriotism card, and he can’t seem to get it through his thick head: This is war.

Al-Qaeda is a foreign enemy making war on America. They are not Americans, entitled as such to the legal protections — habeas corpus, etc. — guaranteed under the Constitution. It would be more apt to compare them to pirates, deserving nothing better than a noose on a rope slung over a yardarm.

But I give Michael Moore credit at least for being consistent and non-partisan. His willingness to take the side of America’s terrorist enemies has apparently not been diminished by the fact that there is a Democrat in the White House.

(Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!


Predictably, Japan Disaster to Be Scene of Next ‘Battle of the Network News Stars’

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So predictable, you can set your watch by it: A catastrophe or crisis makes headlines, and TV news operations compete to see who can get their celebrity on-air talent to the scene first:

Cooper, Amanpour among TV journalists to Japan
U.S. broadcast and cable networks, some of which were short-staffed Friday morning in Japan, are now sending top anchors and correspondents to the northeastern region of the country that’s been ravaged by [Friday’s] earthquake and tsunami. . . .
[Christiane] Amanpour — who’s recently escaped the Beltway to host “This Week” from Tucson, Cairo, and Libya — will host the Sunday public affairs show from Japan, too. . . .
CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who devoted several shows to the Haiti earthquake in 2010, plans to leave for Japan after [Friday night’s] show, a spokeswoman confirmed.

As with the Egypt protest Live-From-Cairo Derby — where the rioting mobs were in danger of getting crowded out of Tahrir Square by all the American network anchors setting up for live remotes — this pilgrimage of TV talking-heads to Japan has absolutely nothing to do with providing news coverage.

Each of these networks has foreign correspondents who could do the job of reporting from the scene. No, let’s call this what it is: A publicity stunt, a star-system celebrity-status game where it’s not enough to let reporters do the reporting, but instead the networks want to send their Famous Faces With Big Names.

The purpose is to signify that this is really important news and that their anchors aren’t just Pretty People who read a Teleprompter in a Manhattan TV studio but are actual honest-to-God journalists. It’s like how, when TV news does a story about Congress, it’s important that the reporter be on camera with the Capitol dome in the background — “See? He’s really there at the Capitol, covering Congress!” — even if what he’s reporting is just stuff that anybody could have picked up off the AP wire.

So now we’ll get to watch footage of Christiane Amanpour and Anderson Cooper walking through scenes of earthquake-and-flood devastation, because it’s important for the networks that we see this story “reported” by their $4-million-a-year superstars.

Beyond the transparent synthetic bogusness of it all, what bugs me is knowing that these jetsetting anchors-on-the-scene are greedily gobbling up air time that, by all rights, ought to go to their networks’ usual Asian/Pacific bureau reporters (who, of course, get a mere fraction of the fat salaries paid to Amanpour, Cooper, et al.).

UPDATE: Is Little Miss Attila accusing moi of cynicism? Don’t hate the player, sweetheart, hate the game.


‘Parker-Spitzer’ to Become ‘Spitzer’?

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The logical consequence of one of the worst programming decisions in the history of television news:

“Parker Spitzer,” CNN’s troubled prime-time talking-head program, is losing its Parker.
Kathleen Parker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion writer, will leave the ratings-deficient show after just four months, the network said Friday.
The program, which airs at 8 p.m. weeknights, will be replaced starting Monday by “In the Arena,” which CNN described as an “ensemble” program that will feature Eliot Spitzer, Parker’s co-host on “Parker Spitzer.” . . .
Parker writes an op-ed column for The Washington Post that is syndicated nationally and will leave to “focus on her writing,” CNN Executive Vice President Ken Jautz said in a face-saving staff memo released to the media. . . . .
“Parker Spitzer” has occasionally finished fourth in its timeslot behind Nancy Grace’s program on CNN’s HLN . . .
Perhaps worse, the program’s audience spiked during a week earlier this month when Parker was off the air. The program had its best weekly ratings in early February, fueled by interest in the crisis in Egypt, with Spitzer as solo host.

So CNN keeps Spitzer, but dumps Parker, evidently deciding that she was the problem, rather than the disgraced former New York governor.

And notice who isn’t getting fired: The CNN executives who came up with this retarded idea for a show.

Category: CNN

‘Obama the Moderate’ Myth

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CNN spins it:

President Barack Obama’s proposed $3.7 trillion budget was slammed by the left and the right Monday. Outraged liberals called it a callous assault on the poor; dismissive conservatives labeled it a debt-riddled assault on future generations.
Which begs the question: Is Obama’s budget blueprint exactly what the president needs to capture the broad political center in the runup to 2012?

CNN’s Alan Silverleib clearly intends to signal that the answer is “yes,” which is the entire point of asking the question. Expect to see many further reiterations of this bogus theme in coming weeks, as the MSM pose their flexible “Moderate Obama” presidential action figure as a super-hero standing guard against “extremism” of all kinds.

El-Baradei: CNN’s Choice, Not Egypt’s

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A little-noted passage in a Wednesday news article:

The Obama administration also reached out to Egypt’s top military officer, stressing the U.S. desire to see calm restored to the streets of Cairo, where pro- and anti-Mubarak forces fought with fists, stones and clubs.

One of the things that has puzzled me for the past couple of days is why U.S. media seem so tardy in following up on indications (see yesterday’s Reuters article and Tuesday’s report by Eric Dondero) that Egyptian military chief Lt. Gen. Sami Enan may emerge as the post-Mubarak leader.

The most obvious explanation — one I discussed by phone yesterday with Dondero — is that the Western press evidently jumped to the conclusion last week that Mohamed El-Baradei is the de facto popular leader of the anti-Mubarak opposition. This media-as-deciders trick gets exposed by Egyptian student Sam Tadros at American Thinker:

CNN’s anointed leader of the Egyptian Revolution must be important to the future of Egypt. Hardly! Outside of Western media hype, El Baradei is nothing. A man that has spent less than 30 days in the past year in Egypt and hardly any time in the past 20 years is a nobody. It is entirely insulting to Egyptians to suggest otherwise.

(Hat-tip: Darleen Click at Protein Wisdom.) El-Baradei is just a media-hyped camera hog with no meaningful popular support and — perhaps most importantly — no support within the Egyptian military. And as the Tadros article makes clear (read the whole thing) the army’s distrust of Mubarak’s son Gamal, who has no military background, was an important background factor in the current crisis. Tadros’ criticism of El-Baradei echoes the quote from the Egyptian university professor who called for Gen. Enan to help form an interm government:

We do not want El-Baradei. He spent too much time abroad, and knows nothing of the daily reality of the Egyptian people. He does not represent us.

This explains a lot about what has happened in the aftermath of Tuesday’s speech by Mubarak. Because El-Baradei is not a popular leader and has no real political base, his status as figurehead leader is dependent on the continuation and success of the protest movement. Once the “transition process” turns to actual politics — i.e., organizing a party, canvassing for votes, etc. — El-Baradei is through.

Remember that before Mubarak’s speech, the protesters had already announced that they were planning their biggest demonstration for this Friday. So when Mubarak announced that he would leave office after the September election, what did El-Baradei say to CNN?

El-Baradei, having already delivered an “ultimatum” that Mubarak must leave Egypt by Friday, said Mubarak would be a “dead man walking” if he did not go immediately. 

This radical intransigence by El-Baradei was the precursor of what has happened in the past two days. El-Baradei clearly wants to get credit as the man who overthrows Mubarak, but if that doesn’t happen now — while El-Baradei still has the protest crowds and the TV cameras — then his moment at center stage is past.

CNN and other Western media are assisting El-Baradei in his self-glorifying game. They need to wake up and smell the opportunism.

PREVIOUSLY:

‘Unbalanced People … Respond to the Vitriol That Comes Out of Certain Mouths’

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Yeah, that’s what Sheriff Dupnik said, and here’s CNN video:

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has the documents from the criminal charges filed against Jared Loughner. But obviously, Sheriff Dupnik has a point. And I think we know who, more than anyone else in America, is responsible for unloading unspeakably hateful “vitriol” into the minds of “unbalanced people”:

Keith Olbermann named Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Allen West, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and the Tea Party movement as somehow responsible for Loughner’s crime. He named them without any evidence or testimony indicating they had anything to do with it. This was indeed a “Special Comment,” and certainly it deserves a special reply.

UPDATE: Noel Sheppard: “ABC Interviews Friend of Giffords Shooter, Ignores Her Claim He’s Liberal.”

It’s not just one network or a handful of tendentious commentators. The atrociously biased reporting — the guilt-by-association tactics even when there is no actual association — we have seen in the coverage of this crime can only be termed the MSNBC-ization of the media.