Cynthia McKinney and Ronald Reagan Grab the Open Mic and Choke Up

CNN's Jeanne Moos has a piece online about politicians getting nicked when they're close to a live mic. The piece itself is a rather meaningless montage of famous private-conversations-gone-public, but really it's about CNN having an excuse to run some hot footage of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, uppity guard puncher, calling her aide Coz Carson a "fool."

After McKinney recognized she'd been busted, she came over to the off-camera segment producer and said, "That was off the record." You can see her smile and try hard -- really, really hard -- not to flip out, but CNN ran it anyway. It's McKinney who plays the fool, again, which fits the current media storyline (and probably reality) on her.

So how does CNN get this tape on the air as news? Well, if they were Fox, they would have just run a "Fox News Alert" and then replayed the footage on Fox & Friends, Dayside, Your World, Big Story, the Factor, and finally Hannity and Warmbody, over and over, until they eventually got to the story of McKinney's poor aide resigning from what must the worst job on earth. Maybe he'll go on Fox to ream her. This is how Republicans run a damn TV network

CNN is like the Democrats, trying to appeal broadly while still losing by not playing dirty. So to contrive this juicy not-really-news clip onto their fiber, they run file footage of other politicians and public persons saying something they shouldn't on the air. Voila, feature! Prince Charles disses a BBC reporter. Britney Spears disses her dancers. Bush & Cheney declare a NY Times reporter a "major-league asshole," and Cheney agrees, "big time."

And then you get Reagan's "We begin bombing in five minutes" joke, which wasn't really an open-mic gaffe as much as a "sound check" joke that got on tape. And then you get Connie Chung's merciless media-rape of Newt Gingrich's smokin' old momma, pretty much the last unsupervised mom-of-politician interview ever to happen. Newt called the First Lady a bitch. That was just between Mama Gingrich and Connie Maury'swife, you see. Courageous.

Eventually, the piece returns to the money shot, Congresswoman McKinney demanding the camera crew not use the footage of her plunging a knife into her top aide's back. The piece doesn't show whether they told the Congresswoman they would use it, sell it, or hold it. It's just McKinney, desperately trying to save her mangled scraps of dignity, serving herself up as media gristle again.

Comments

[porkwatson]

LOL. I remember that "Newtie called her a bitch" thing. Connie Chung -- hellfire awaits.