The New York Observer’s Philip Weiss takes issue with something Cooper said during his Yale commencement address…

Anderson Cooper’s down-home, appealing commencement speech at Yale 10 days ago was marred by a crack he took at Yoko Ono. He brought up a commencement speech she gave 3 years ago, as a non-model

Time Magazine’s Andrea Sachs has 10 questions for Anderson Cooper…

Does fame hurt your reporting?

If someone knows me and likes me or my work, they’re more likely to allow me to tell their story. But it also cuts the other way. The thing I love about reporting is being able to blend in with any group, whether that’s neo-Nazis or pedophiles. Frankly, I’m the same person I’ve always been, and I’m pretty good at blending in.

Will you stay where you are?

I love what I’m doing. CNN is a cool place to work because I’m able to anchor and still do a lot of field reporting. But I’ve never hung anything on the walls in the offices I’ve had because nothing seems to last very long in TV. Who knows what will happen down the road?

The Patriot News’ Barry Fox has an interview with HLN’s Glenn Beck…

Ironically, this latest venture, which can be seen weekdays at 7 p.m. with replays at 9 p.m. and midnight, was something he wasn’t interested in doing.

“I’m not a fan of cable news, I want to hang myself when I watch,” Beck said. At his first meeting with CNN executives “I told them ‘I hate cable news’ and I spent 10 minutes telling them what I won’t do.”

The CNN suits agreed the genre needed to change and that they were looking to do something different.

A deal was struck, and “I walked out of the meeting with my business manager and I felt like at the end of ‘The Candidate’ with Robert Redford, ‘Now what?’”

Mutichannel News’ George Winslow chronicles what is happening on the three cable news channels in a must read full of juicy quotes and fascinating statistics. And then there’s this pair of nut graphs that I think should be bulliten boarded in all three newsrooms…

The power and profitability of 24-hour cable news, though, has drawn unwelcome attention from critics who complain about their reliance on political pundits and inexpensive talk show formats at the expense of objective reporting.

“When Ted Turner started CNN, he said there wouldn’t be any stars; the news would be the star,” said Linda Ellerbee, whose company produced a 2004 documentary on the cable news business, Feeding the Beast: The 24 Hour News Revolution. Ellerbee, who now anchors Nick News and is producing an upcoming special on Katrina for the show, said “the idea was to turn on the camera and let the viewers see what was happening in the world. Now cable news is dominated by stars. They rarely turn on the camera and let you see what’s happening. The world is filtered through the opinions of those stars and talk shows fill up primetime. That’s very entertaining and very profitable but it blurs the line between opinion and fact.”

Johnny Dollar has the video of the screaming match between Julie Banderas and Shirley Phelps-Roper that erupted earlier tonight on The Big Story Weekend when Roper went off the deep end and Banderas called her out for it. It was really quite the spectacle…

UPDATE: I suppose it would help if I put the link in. Grrrr…