CNN President Jon Klein recently announced to a Huffington Post interviewer that CNN beats Fox News overall, and at 4, 5, 6, and 10. That would mean Klein boasted about Lou Dobbs at 6, even though he can’t really control him. Klein, best known as the man who killed "Crossfire" in 2005, lamenting the "noise" and nastiness of elbow-throwing partisan TV, must have rolled his eyes when Dobbs booked Ann Coulter on January 7 and praised her as "the sharpest-tongued, sharpest-witted conservative out there." He started by mocking deniers of liberal bias:
DOBBS: That's the reason we want you here, because we want to drive book sales and to see you again and talk about those nasty liberals that you just skewer in your books --
COULTER: Thank you.
DOBBS: -- In almost every word. But I've got to ask you, this liberal bias in the media. [putting on sarcasm] I've never noticed such a thing. What makes you think there's such a thing?
COULTER: Well, I have about 200 pages in this book, maybe more, covering just that. I must say, this last campaigns the 2008 campaign, was a beautiful template. I was not planning on writing as much about the media or politics Bush since I was writing the book as the campaign was going on, walking through the kitchen you keep hearing about the Republican attack machine. I wish we had a Republican attack machine.
Video can be found here. Coulter not only noted an example of liberal bias – no story about Code Pink protesters trying to ruin Sarah Palin’s address at the Republican convention in St. Paul – but lamented that male Republicans refrained from punching the Code Pink women "in the yap" to stop the protester madness:
DOBBS: Whatever one thinks of you, whether they're conservative or liberals, you're the, without question, the sharpest-tongued, sharpest-witted conservative out there.
COULTER: Thank you.
DOBBS: One has to admire the energy and effort you bring to your cause.
COULTER: Thank you.
DOBBS: As you look at this administration and conservatives across the board in this country, principally, you wonder what are you doing, wasting our time? They're unengaging, they're uninspiring, and they sit there and sort of take it --
COULTER: -- I want to tell you what I was thinking of calling this book but I don't think we can say it on air, about the Republicans.
DOBBS: Now you have everyone's imagination raging.
COULTER: It's a funny title. One beautiful example of this and illustrating the theme of the book is in the last chapter. At the Republican National Convention, Sarah Palin gets up to give her -- the most important political speech in a decade, where she's being introduced to the nation, two Obama fund-raisers stand up and start screaming at her and storming the stage. Now, point one, how many newspapers reported that story? That's right, two local newspapers.
DOBBS: Is that right?
COULTER: No place else. Do you think it would have made news if a major McCain fund-raiser had stood up during Obama’s speech at the conventions, started screaming and storming the stage? Moreover, this -- I mean, the stunning thing about the story is, if you can get the video, and you can only see it online, you see all these Republican men standing there, right next to these screaming banshees doing nothing. You have this 99-pound woman on stage trying to deliver the most important speech -- how about a punch in the yap to these screaming banshees?
Coulter’s TV tour didn’t go unprotested on CNN. On Sunday’s Reliable Sources, CNN’s Frank Sesno (once the network's Washington bureau chief) complained that she’s still making appearances, but he seemed to miss the tour stop at CNN:
And that's the problem we've got going on now. It doesn't matter what you say, it matters how well you do on television. And outrage sells and outrage pays. In the end, you'd like to think you're judged by the company you keep. And NBC should be judged and everybody else should be judged by the company they keep. But as I say, the more outrageous, the more outspoken someone is, somehow the more they're rewarded.
For her to run around and keep referring to "B. Hussein Obama," this other kind of business which also came up, it's just amazing.
