Last night’s Angelina Jolie appearance on Anderson Cooper 360 brought in 1.3 million viewers which was good for Cooper but it wasn’t his #1 program of the year. His #1 program was on January 3rd with 1.4 million viewers. Some people would argue that this is a lower number than it should have been since this thing was hyped to death and yet 360 never broke 2 million viewers. Some people would point to Larry King and say if it had been King’s interview the show would have broken 2 million easy. And it’s true according to the ratings (on TVNewser) that 360’s 2 hour broadcast couldn’t beat the total viewers of any of FNC’s prime time shows (though if you split 360 in half, the first half would beat 2/3 of FNC’s prime time lineup).

But it is also true that 360 pulverized everyone else in the Demo and single handedly gave CNN the win for the Demo that night. You have 1.3 million viewers and almost 50% of that is Demo age…that’s impressive. Nobody usually has anything close to a 50% Demo share on a given show. Cable news skews old, not young. This was an anomaly; albeit a welcome one for CNN.

The problem is, though, those young Demo viewers tuned in to see Jolie and not Cooper. In a day or so…maybe as soon as tonight… Cooper will be back down to his normal, much lower, Demo average. After all, he can’t have a topical superstar interview every night. Can he?

GretaWire wants to hear from you about how graphic should war coverage be…

I guess the bottom line is this: Before I would report on this story, I would need to think long and hard how best to do it. As it turned out, so many other shows before us were doing the story that we did not cover it at 10 p.m. ET. I could not think of a way we could tell the news story differently, so I opted not to do it. It was told many times yesterday. Each time it was shown, I watched. We have done lots of war stories, but not this one — at least not last night.

But I do want to pose this question to you: How graphic should we get when we describe war? Tell it exactly like it is, no matter how brutal? Or tone it down a bit — but not so much as to distort the plain truth? Please e-mail me.

MSNBC announced yesterday that Live and Direct will be in Los Angeles today and tomorrow covering the preparations for the American Idol concert tour…

MSNBC’s Rita Cosby will go behind-the-scenes of “American Idols Live” to give viewers a sneak peak of the fifth annual “American Idol” concert tour. Cosby will have an all-access pass to the concert rehearsals, and she will chat with the “American Idol” finalists who will be performing in the tour. The special “Rita Cosby: Live and Direct” episode will air Thursday, June 22. Cosby will be hosting from Los Angeles both Wednesday and Thursday nights.

As the “American Idol” finalists gear up to go on the road, Cosby will talk to them about the details of the nationwide tour, their individual and group performances, and what it is like for them to prepare and rehearse with one another. “American Idols Live” kicks off Wednesday, July 5 in Manchester, N.H.

Johnny Dollar emailed in to note that FNC’s Senior Judicial Analyst Andrew Napolitano is headed down to Guantanamo Bay…

Judge Andrew Napolitano has beenvery critical of the legality of some of the US anti-terror measures. He is today on his way to Guantanamo prison for what should prove to be a most interesting first-hand report.

Wow. First O’Reilly visits Gitmo a couple of weeks ago. Now Napolitano.

UPDATE: Dollar now has audio of Napololitano phoning in from Gitmo to Brian Kilmeade on their radio show

Variety’s Brian Lowry pens another cynical piece on the media journalists and their hypocracy…

We lament when elder statesmen like Dan Rather are ushered out of a place like CBS NewsCBS News, yet largely ignore such veterans and praise them too little while panting after Anderson Cooper, Katie Couric or the next “It” guy or gal. Fixtures like Rather and Mike Wallace suddenly become newsworthy only when somebody prods them toward retirement, at which point we magically rediscover them, even when they’re several years past the age at which most of us would welcome lying on a beach somewhere.

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We bemoan the public’s preference for trash TV over highbrow PBS fare but, in our own elective viewing, couldn’t absorb enough amphetamines to stay awake through a documentary about Darfur or Afghanistan.

CNN and FNC are both covering President Bush’s comments at the US - EU Summit in Vienna. MSNBC, however, apparently couldn’t be bothered to dump out of Imus early and pre-empt the Countdown 9 am repeat to cover it.

UPDATE: Sure enough, Bush made news during the presser. CNN and FNC were all over the news. MSNBC was all over tape until 10 am.

UPDATE2: According to a commentor, MSNBC did cover at least part of the press conference. Must have been a really small part because every time I changed over to MSNBC between 8:50 and 9:30 I saw either Imus or Countdown.

The LA Times Scott Collins, though he tries to deny it, takes aim at CNN over the Angelina Jolie interview as being an example of CNN putting celebrity journalism ahead of hard news…

The Jolie interview does seem a watershed moment in the history of CNN, though, or maybe in the history of celebrity journalism. For years the network was derided as stodgy and out of it, as grandpa’s video wire service. The Anderson-Angelina meeting of minds does seem to whisper goodbye to all that. This is like ABC making Barbara Walters co-anchor in the 1970s, or CBS launching the yuppie newsmag “West 57th” — a deliberate break with the past.

But Cooper doesn’t seem too concerned with that. He seems mostly angry about Internet haters who claim some sort of shadowy deal between his show and People magazine’s purchase of Shiloh baby photos. “CNN did not pay anything — directly or indirectly — to get Angelina Jolie to sit down for an interview,” he wrote on his blog.

Is he protesting too much? Or upset about the wrong thing?

One thing’s clear. After the interview runs, Jolie will still be big. It’s the news networks that got small.

UPDATE: Whoops…forgot the link. Fixed.

The Times Picayune’s Susan Larson has an interview with Anderson Cooper prior to Cooper’s return to New Orleans for the American Library Association convention…

And, like other Katrina survivors and journalists, he has his own anxieties — and yes, hopes — for the coming months.

“I’m hoping that it will be a very boring, non-eventful hurricane season,” he said. “But shame on all of us if we just move on and forget what happened here. It’s been important to me to try to do whatever I can. . . . People are so friendly, so kind, and they so want the rest of the country to not move on. I certainly understand that.

“I don’t want to let New Orleans down.”