Public Eye takes Matt Drudge to task for cherry picking quotes from Andy Rooney when he was on Imus on MSNBC this morning….

The Drudge Report today is featuring some comments made by CBS’ Andy Rooney on the “Imus” program this morning and it’s getting some traction in the blogosphere. Here’s the one sentence that Drudge puts on his site:

“I have a problem with the term African American … The word negro is a perfectly good word. There is nothing wrong with that.”

That happens to be an incorrect quote, one that serves Drudge’s need for hype.

I guess the implication is that Rooney made some controversial or politically-incorrect comments about race. While it’s not beyond Rooney’s candor and style to do that, I think this exchange is far more benign than what Drudge would have you think. The discussion began as host Don Imus was referencing a frequent guest, Congressman Harold Ford Jr. (D-TN) and noted that Ford is African-American.

Crooks and Liars has the video….

Harry Shearer weighs in on Aaron Brown….

People on modern-day American television can’t just be thoughtful guys, assuming that Mr. Brown is one. They have to play one; and, given that newscasters aren’t actors, that means overplay. Of course, emotional guys have to play their role, too, but, in modern-day American television, we know which of those two acts inevitably wins out.

Nonetheless, it’s worth pausing over some of the quotes uttered by CNN’s honcho du jour Jonthan Klein as he shoved Mr. Thoughtful out the door for Mr. Emotional.

Page Six uses the I-Man to tweak MSNBC….

NOT even Don Imus, whose morning radio show has been simulcast on MSNBC for years, says nice things about the little-watched cable channel. Yesterday, reacting to news that Aaron Brown had left CNN and been replaced by Anderson Cooper, the I-Man said, “Which means there will be, very soon, ‘The Aaron Brown Report’ here on MSNBC, because the MO for MSNBC is [that] anybody at either Fox or CNN who can’t get it done, they hire ‘em here, thinking I don’t know what . . .” A television insider recently described MSNBC as “an elephants’ graveyard.”

The AP’s David Bauder writes about Chris Wallace interviewing his father, Mike Wallace, on this weekend’s Fox New Sunday…

Before arriving at a TV studio Thursday for an interview to promote his memoir, Mike Wallace had a feeling that hundreds of people who had sat across from him with the cameras rolling would find familiar.

“I was intimidated ahead of time, I have to say,” he said. “Who knows what he really had in mind?”

His interrogator was his son, Chris. Their talk, taped for “Fox News Sunday,” represented the first time father and son had crossed paths professionally in careers that together stretches three-quarters of a century.
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Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman….

As a media columnist, I get frequent emails from CNN, telling me every gory detail of the network’s ratings improvement.

I applaud the efforts of news chief Klein to make CNN look as newsy as possible. Klein disowns its previous incarnation — make that incarnations, as TV’s Car-chase News Network, Clinton News Network, not to mention the viewer’s “destination” (as TV people like to say) for coverage of burning buildings and the missing-white-woman du jour.

But primetime is different. During the day, the news is fresh. At night, though, a network has to show some imagination and give the public a genuine reason to watch its offerings.

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