She's Not A Pundit, She Just Plays One On TV

Hi everybody. Doin' a little friend pimpage tonight. As I stated in this post, my friend Rachel contributes to The Huffington Post. Many news cycles ago she wrote a piece that focused on Scott McClellan's (remember him?) media tour and how the temperature of the hot seat vastly differed, depending on the interviewer. Well, apparently what she wrote piqued the interest of al-Jazeera English and they invited her to do an interview for Listening Post, a media review show. Fast forward to me staying up half the night to help her prep and make sure she was well versed in anything and everything occurring these last seven years involving the intersection of media and the Bush Administration. Which, um, is a lot.

We went over everything from NBC's rebuking of Ashleigh Banfield when she dared to criticize the Iraq War to government scripted video news releases masquerading as actual news reports (in Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting) to supposed independent military analysts pushing the agenda of the Pentagon. And after all of that . . . the show cut her interview into a few tiny soundbytes. But hey, that's the way the media ball bounces and it actually turned out to be a really good segment, so I hope you watch. Rachel and I found the back to back soundbytes with Anderson Cooper kind of hilariously ironic. I actually encourage you guys to watch the channel online (it's not carried by most cable providers) because it's actually pretty good, especially when it comes to international news. I happened to catch a really great report by a young journalist who snuck into Burma to cover the cyclone aftermath. Hm, who does that remind me of?