CNN anchor Aaron Brown, once thought by a few misguided souls to be the next grand old man of TV news, is leaving the network. A company-wide memo issued yesterday says he wants to, ahem, "spend some well-deserved time off with his family."
I say good riddance, and take that caked-up Junior League mannequin Kyra Phillips with you.
Aside from his whiny cadence, Brown's sycophantic homerism during the opening days of the war was made all the more galling by his sustained indignance toward Arab news outlets like Al Jazeera for doing exactly what the American media was doing. You could've driven a small church through this gape-brained hypocrisy.
So much of what comes on CNN these days is a thinly-veiled aping of Fox News, but without the face-stomping Chyron assault and fascist-chic bumper music, it's not even successful on those terms. Time Warner has managed to render CNN both insipid and flaccid, and Brown was the pseudo-genteel poster boy for that transformation.
Anderson Cooper will be taking over Brown's 9pm spot. While I harbor fears of Cooper's career track following Geraldo Rivera's, it's still an improvement.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
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3 comments:
What? Skinhead brawls, Satanic sacrifice and mobster's tombs aren't newsy enough for you media elites? Cooper is so boring that he makes Stone Phillips seem like Liberace on meth. Geraldo has the chops - and the chest hair for the job. How ABC, NBC, Fox and everyone else let him get away is beyond me.
Boy, Greg. I'm seriously enjoying your blog. And that's saying something, given how monotonous many other blogs are. In any case, I'd chime in that there really were no "national" news sources any less pandering than CNN regarding the war, and a whole lot more that were more so. That said, your "anonymous" fellow is right. Geraldo really is a force of nature and more perversely entertaining than even the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal editorial page combined. Gary Trudeau, a truly prescient man, pegged Geraldo perfectly as far back as the 1970s in a series of cartoons about the media invading a small town (I can't remember the reason for the invasion), in which he represented Geraldo as being nothing more than a long, colorful scarf. (Like he draws Bush as nothing more than a cowboy hat, etc.)
Liberace on meth - that is scary-rich!
And Geraldo is most definitely a force. "The Daily Show" as we know it wouldn't exist without him.
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