Public Eye’s Brian Montopoli disagrees with Tim Goodman…

I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with Goodman. It seems to me that Cooper has experienced the ups-and-downs of “insta-fame” quite a bit already. Around the time of Hurricane Katrina, during which he conducted a confrontational interview with Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, Cooper was hailed as journalism’s savior, a compassionate newsman who brought heart and outrage back into the news business. But once he was named as Aaron Brown’s replacement at CNN – just about two months later – he had gone from the solution to the problem.

Montopoli goes on to question the need for the hype on both sides of the Cooper issue…
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Paul J. Gough in the Hollywood Reporter has more details….

MSNBC will debut an as-yet-untitled weekly program in January featuring the husband-and-wife team of Connie Chung and Maury Povich. It will be executive produced by Lizz Winstead, co-creator and former head writer of “The Daily Show.” She also has been involved with Air America Radio, a liberal talk radio network. The half-hour show will feature Chung and Povich discussing the media and spin as well as having guests from the world of politics, media and pop culture. MSNBC president Rick Kaplan said, “It’s what two people would do over breakfast in the morning.” Kaplan, who has known Chung for more than 30 years and Povich for more than 20 years, said Winstead is a “brilliant” producer and said it would resemble “The Daily Show” in being edgy and clever.

Interesting what popped up on TVNewser today from a “CNN employee”….

Anderson Cooper did not just have a good run reporting from the field on one story and get his own show like Ashleigh Banfield. Cooper has anchored a weekday program for over a year and weekends for a year before that. He has delivered real ratings and has a real following…not something imagined or speculated about as in the MSNBC case. The comparison is a sham and should be off the website.

Keep in mind Anderson has not just been a show anchor — he anchored WEEKS of War Coverage during the breaking news overnight period when ALL the news was unfolding from the field and he was virtually flawless. There is no tougher anchor role than that. That was when he earned his stripes and got his own weekday program. Since then he’s not only risen as an anchor but in subsequent stories from the Tsunami, to Schiavo, to the Pope’s death, to the Iraqi elections, to the famine in Niger, to the hurricanes. He dwarfs Banfield in every way…even longevity ALREADY

I quote this in full because it deserves examination. Clearly the sudden Banfied references being applied to Cooper in two different columns on both coasts of the U.S. simultaneously, which were subequently picked up on by all the sites, is a monkey wrench that CNN had neither anticipated nor wanted thrown into their carefully coreographed rollout of the the new CNN primetime lineup. One wonders how high up in the CNN chain this comment came from.
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Word is that the Scarborough Country shift to 4pm this week is for the week only. Can anyone confirm this? It really doesn’t make any sense to me at all if this is true.

UPDATE: This is part of a week long Scarborough Country special which is being advertised on MSNBC TV. Unfortunately I only caught the tail end of the ad and there’s nothing on this on MSNBC’s web site yet (and nothing on NBC’s Media Village either…yet) so I don’t have much more than this at the moment.

The New York Post’s Don Kaplan speculates….

COLUMNIST Robert Novak appears to be done at CNN.
Novak, a longtime Washington insider and CNN player, has been off the air since last August — when he uttered an obscenity on the air and stalked off a live appearance.

The network suspended him immediately but has never said when he would again be back on CNN.

Novak has a contract with CNN that is said to expire in early 2006.

The debate inside CNN is what — if anything — to do about it.

Liz Smith in the New York Post is cautiously negative about it (though she gets the number of hours the show will be on the air wrong)

MY WORD! Just when I thought CNN had already solved the problem of newscasts that feature what the networks call “the voice of God” anchor and just when CNN was doing a new kind of informal, fun and intimate way of covering the news without stultification — by giving Aaron Brown his head — they foul up and let him go. I can’t imagine what I will do now late at nights without Aaron. He is unique and brilliant, funny, sardonic, offbeat!

As much as I like, enjoy and admire Anderson Cooper (especially in the field) — isn’t three hours of him a little much for someone relatively untried? I fear CNN will now debase the excellent coin this young newscaster built up by overexposing him.
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Eric Naing in the Daily Illini uses the 360 move as an indictment of cable news in general…

But even more frightening than Blitzer and his plasma screens is the growing cult of Anderson Cooper. His show, “Anderson Cooper 360,” has made a big splash on the cable news world, but the bigger story is the non-threatening, genial boy wonder who hosts the show.

In a clear sign of the network’s direction, CNN recently replaced the admittedly frumpy but always thoughtful Aaron Brown and his insightful show “NewsNight” with a longer version of “Anderson Cooper 360.”
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Charlie McCollum in the San Jose Mercury News manages to get through his blurb without dropping Banfield’s name….

A second departure this week that wasn’t totally unexpected: Aaron Brown’s exit from CNN and the end of his “Newsnight'’ show. It’s been clear for some time that erudite Brown was not a favorite of CNN boss Jonathan Klein, while Anderson Cooper — who now gets the 7 p.m. (PST) slot for his “Anderson Cooper 360′’ news show — was Klein’s pick to be the face of CNN.
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Tim Goodman in the San Francisco Chronicle does his take and the “B” word is dropped again! Is this a conspiracy?

Jonathan Klein, president of CNN and the architect for the ouster of Aaron Brown and the ascension of Anderson Cooper, graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a degree in history.

Uh-oh.

Maybe the philosophy of George Santayana — “Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — never made it into class, even in its misquoted form: “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.”

Same idea, really, minus the grace of the original. But all of this points, as it often does in TV, to one inescapable name:

Ashleigh Banfield.

The New York Times’ Jacques Steinberg scoops on Connie Chung and Maury Povich coming to MSNBC Weekends…

Connie Chung, not seen regularly on television since CNN canceled her prime-time program in early 2003, will return to cable news in January as the host of a weekly show on MSNBC that the network president hopes will allow her to play Katharine Hepburn to her co-host’s Spencer Tracy.

Her on-screen sparring partner is the man who already has the job off camera: her husband of 20 years, the talk show host Maury Povich.

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In what is the first of what is probably going to be a succession of Anderson Cooper articles intended to promote 360 moving to 10 pm weeknights, The Boston Globe’s Joanna Weiss writes about…well…Anderson Cooper 360 moving to 10 pm weeknights….

Tonight on CNN: The cult of personality begins.

That’s how many media critics have reacted to the rise of Anderson Cooper, the 38-year-old news host who assumes the network’s highest-profile anchor slot tonight.

When CNN announced last week that ‘’Anderson Cooper 360″ was moving from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m on weekdays — and that network stalwart Aaron Brown, host of ‘’NewsNight” in that time slot, was leaving altogether — critics howled about the triumph of glitter over gravitas. The boyish metrosexual who once hosted the reality show ‘’The Mole” had edged out the measured, old-school anchorman. TV news would never be the same.

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