CNN morning anchor Soledad O'Brien granted an interview to The Hollywood Reporter to react to charges she was reading from the left-wing Talking Points Memo blog on air. She insisted she's utterly non-ideological on the CNN set.
"I don't think I show bias in my TV show. I think I am aggressive with people about trying to find the facts behind what they say," O'Brien told the Reporter's Paul Bond. "Am I a liberal or conservative? I'm neither. Like most Americans, I find politics very frustrating. Like most Americans, I'd like to hear from politicians the facts. That is what drives me." She admitted using TPM, but only for facts, a quote from Sen. Ron Wyden, because her Republican guest was lying:
"Editorially, I was not reading off the Talking Points Memo," she said on Wednesday. "The memo had an accurate, verbatim quote of what Sen. Wyden said, and when I was talking to Ms. Comstock, she was saying something that was patently untrue."
She also said she uses conservative sources, like RedState.com.
Bond asked O'Brien about Rush Limbaugh's critiques, including photos on his website of her with a bumper sticker on her forehead touting the Obama-Biden ticket.
"I didn't hear what he had to say, and it's sort of irrelevant to what I do," O'Brien said Wednesday. "People are entitled to do what they want, and I do what I do -- which is, as a journalist, focus on the substance of someone's argument."
Bond noticed that the critiques keep coming: "Meanwhile, one of O’Brien’s more relentless critics, the conservative media-watchdog group Newsbusters, was suggesting that the CNN anchor was again using TPM as an uncited source, also during a discussion about Medicare and budgets."
(Image, TeaParty.org; HT: Keep Graham Harrell)
