anderson cooper

Hard to believe summer is winding down and we haven’t had a major hurricane make landfall in the U.S. yet. That could all be changing now with Irene:

Irene, the ninth named storm of the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season, was expected to pass over Puerto Rico overnight and could strengthen into a hurricane as it approached the Dominican Republic on Monday, forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

It would be the first hurricane of the busy -- but so far not destructive -- 2011 Atlantic hurricane season.

At 5 p.m. (2100 GMT), Irene had top winds of 50 miles per hour and was near the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix, about 120 miles east-southeast of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Irene was a large storm and moving west-northwest.

This morning the NHC upgraded Irene to a category 1 hurricane and expected to strengthen more over the next 48 hours. The current projections have Irene grazing the eastern side of Cuba Wednesday and Thursday and hit the eastern coast of Florida on Friday.

Anderson Cooper is seeing his ratings plummet:

The respected CNN anchor has seen his numbers slip significantly through the past year. His 10 p.m. show, "Anderson Cooper 360," has declined 62% in total viewers and 70% in adults 25-54 from November 2008, according to Nielsen figures.

Last month, in Cooper's time slot, Fox News' "On the Record" attracted an average viewership of 1.9 million while "360" averaged 672,000; repeats of MSNBC's "Countdown" and HLN's Nancy Grace show averaged 655,000 and 458,000, respectively.

But in the ad-friendly 25-54 demo, those same repeats won out over Cooper with 224,000 (MSNBC) and 214,000 (HLN).

CNN really needs to make some big changes and make them quick. Cooper is at the point that he’s getting beat by reruns. That is really sad in the news industry.

The big F.U. that corporate media execs gave to the American people and, more importantly, U.S. soldiers. Jessica Yellin told Anderson Cooper last night the following:

Yellin: I think the press corps dropped the ball in the beginning when the lead up to war began, uh the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the President’s high approval ratings and my own experience at the White House was that the higher the President’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives, and I was not at this network at the time, but the more pressure I had from these executives to put on positive stories about the President. I think over time….

The video is available at Crooks and Liars.

As Glenn Greenwald puts it:

Yellin's admission is but the latest in a growing mountain of evidence demonstrating that corporate executives forced their news reporters to propagandize in favor of the Bush administration and the war, and censored stories that were critical of the Government. Katie Couric yesterday said that threats from the White House and accusations of being unpatriotic coerced the media into suppressing its questioning of the war. But last September, Couric revealed even more specifically the type of pressure that was put on her by NBC executives to refrain from criticizing the administration, after she conducted a "tough interview" with Condoleezza Rice:

Via Atrios:

For much of the past week, CNN and its White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux have offered a steady stream of inaccurate and incomplete coverage of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) trip to the Middle East and her April 3 meeting with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

Please join Media Matters for America in demanding that CNN and Malveaux stop misinforming viewers about Pelosi's trip and present all the facts. CNN's contact information can be found in our "Take Action!" sidebar on the right.

Since April 2, Malveaux has wrongly and repeatedly claimed that Pelosi had no "standing" and was not acting in an "official capacity," has attacked the trip as "political theater" and a "political stunt," and has parroted the Bush administration's attacks on Pelosi for going to Syria while ignoring the fact that a Republican-led delegation met with Assad on April 1. Most recently, Malveaux asked whether Pelosi's trip was a "big wet kiss to President Al-Assad."

Other CNN personalities have joined in as well. Lou Dobbs devoted an entire segment to "Pelosi's bad trip," while the April 3 edition of Anderson Cooper 360 featured a segment on Pelosi's trip titled "Talking to Terrorists."

After several days of inaccurate, one-sided coverage, it's time to tell CNN enough is enough. It's time to take action.

There is a big discussion going on here in Ohio right now. At the center of the discussion is pending legislation called Kristin's Law. This new law will require sexual predators to have green license plates on their vehicles. Last night Anderson Cooper had Kevin Coulghlin, the state senator who wrote this legislation, to discuss the impact it may have:

This may sound like some sound legislation on the outside, but will it really work?

Ten years ago Ohio started the sexual offenders registration list. To date there are almost 16,000 names on the list. This is, however, a highly inflated number.

I know of cases where 18 year old boys had sex with their 16 year old girlfriend, resulting in the girl getting pregnant. The parents of the girl get upset and file charges against the boy and in turn he gets convicted of having sex with a minor and being branded a sex offender for life. There are numerous other cases that are similar to this.

What the sexual offender list has become is a form of punishment instead of a tool of warning. Something as innocent as the incident I cite happens and judges decide to invoke the list as part of their sentence, causing serious negative consequences.

First - should the boy be branded the same as someone in their 50's who rapes a 13 year old? That doesn't seem right.

Secondly, and the most serious, is that the list is becoming unmanageable. The true repeat offenders never follow the rules. I can't tell you how many times I have heard of a child being raped by a repeat offender who didn't follow the rules and their information on the list became outdated.

Coughlin is trying to assure people that the plates will not be used as generously as the list. The list also was created with these promises. So now we have people being branded with green license plates like the 18 year old boy I mentioned; all because a judge wants to set an "example".

Last night during Anderson Cooper, I finally had it. I heard the following statement for the millionth time yesterday and blew up:

Will the Democrats start investigations to get back at Republicans?

Since when is oversight, as provided by the Constitution, some sort of “payback”? This is the new meme the so-called “liberal” media is using. They are already making it sound like any investigations the Democrats launch will be strictly for payback purposes.

This is not just insulting to the Democrats, but also to the very process of our democracy. During the 90’s, the media never coined the 50+ investigations into Clinton as “payback”. Now it is?

The Iraq war has gone on longer than World War 2. To make matters even worse, the Iraq war has seen less oversight than any other war in the history of our country. Don’t the 3,000 American soldiers and countless Iraqi’s who have lost their lives in this war deserve some serious attention from our Congress? This attention should have been given time and time again, but the Republicans refused to do so. The American people realized this gross negligence by one branch of our government, and voted to change that branch. If the Democrats don’t investigate, then they will be as guilty as the Republicans of ignoring their constitutional duty.

We hear constantly of some sort of “liberal bias” in our media. Well this new meme proves that “liberal bias” is nothing more than a myth. The media has been in Iraq and reporting how horrible it is, yet they want to make it sound like some sort of high-school game of “payback” if the Democrats do about the only thing they really can – hold investigations?

"Truth no longer matters in the context of politics and, sadly, in the
context of cable news," said Aaron Brown, whose four-year period as anchor
of CNN's NewsNight ended in November, when network executives gave his job
to Anderson Cooper in a bid to push the show's ratings closer to
front-runner Fox News.

Read the full article

here.

I miss Aaron Brown. He was great to watch and gave such good reports. You
could also tell he didn't pander to the corporate bean counters and their
continued watching of viewer shares. Viewer ratings is all that matters to these
news networks and nothing else matters to them.

No - definatley not me unless the people picking the names are over weight older gals drunk off of Jaggermeister

CNN did a special segment tonight on the annual Sexiest Men in People
magazine. Listening to it, you hear mostly names you would expect - Matthew
Mcconaughey, Anderson Cooper, Viggo Mortensen, etc. Suddenly I heard a
name I would never expect to hear in such a segment. It's a name that is not
uncommon to hear now a days, as matter of fact it is a very common name. He is
on the news constantly and now he has a little extra glimmer by being included
in People's sexiest men category. That person is none other than:

Patrick Fitzgerald. They even referred to him as the "very special
prosecutor".

This has got me wondering now how long before the right wing starts on a
liberal media smear campaign over this. You can almost guarantee yourself that
Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter will jump all over this. It should provide some
interesting side bars to the rather serious issues that emerge in our news
daily.

Personally I think Patrick Fitzgerald looks like a younger (or hairier) Larry
Miller. This of course is not an insult as I am a fan of Larry Miller and really
enjoy his views on politics.