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Granted, it's hard to hear because the voices speak over each other, but the graphics are pretty clear: this ad for Anderson Cooper 360 was meant to claim that Anderson Cooper challenges the status quo and goes beyond partisan spin. Whether the ad is true or not is arguable, but the fact that it mentions both the right and the left is not.

Which makes this op-ed in Time Magazine by Michael Scherer that much more puzzling:

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn appeared Sunday morning on Howard Kurtz's CNN show Reliable Sources to discuss her comments in my TIME magazine story this week. She continued her criticism of Fox News[..].

The ironic part came later, during the commercial break. All morning, CNN has been intermittently running a promo for Anderson Cooper 360, a show that has long billed itself as a classic straight news program with an investigative front man who digs "beyond the headlines" with "many points of view, so you can make up your own mind." The new promo, by contrast, consists of a woman's voice, pitching Cooper's show as, essentially, a liberal alternative to Fox News: "I'm a lifelong Democrat," she says, "and that's why I watch Anderson Cooper." Hmmm. The voice goes on to say that Cooper is the person she can turn to hold "right wing" conservatives accountable. Cooper is not exactly aiming for the political middle ground here.

But then who is? MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz are committed liberals, increasingly focused on the dual project of holding President Obama to a liberal line and attacking his detractors. Fox News, on the other hand, is, well, Fox News. Dunn, on Kurtz's show, made a point of criticizing Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace for "fact checking" an Obama administration official but not its other Republican guests. So it goes.

Interesting. So Scherer thinks that Cooper is playing to the left like those other "committed" liberals on MSNBC. And lemming-like, here comes Dan Abrams, tweeting from his new gig at Mediaite:

UPDATE to WH-Fox 'Gloves off' post: CNN promo calls Anderson Cooper left's answer to FNC.

The only problem? There's no there there. Cooper wasn't playing to the left, as Scherer was forced to acknowledge in an update:

CORRECTION: Ahh, the pitfalls of technology. In the post below, I wrote about an ad that kept running Sunday morning on CNN, which I watched in the background as I scribbled away at my office. Several times, I heard an ad for Anderson Cooper's show that included a woman's voice talking about being a "lifelong Democrat" and watching Cooper because he called out the "right wing." But that's not the whole story. I was told Monday by CNN that I only heard half the ad, which was dubbed in stereo. (Apparently my television is mono.) The other half of the ad had a male voice saying he was a Republican who turns to Anderson Cooper because he holds accountable "left wing politicians." The two voices are recorded to be talking over each other, reaffirming CNN's place in the center of the cable news spectrum. This makes my subsequent analysis largely wrong. Cooper was not signaling a shift to cater to a left-wing audience. He was signaling that he wanted both a left-wing and a right-wing audiences at the same time. The CNN dream of post-partisanship, in other words, is still alive.

Actually, Michael, your analysis is not largely wrong, but completely wrong. As polarized as this country is now (a fact for which I hold the media mostly accountable), it is not the desire of the entire country to get their news filtered through ideological lenses, confirming their pre-conceived notions. Fox unapologetically fills a niche for a select few, who cannot stand to have their ideas challenged. But MSNBC, despite shows with Maddow (the only self-professed liberal listed), Olbermann and Schultz does not cater to the left. If they did, would they fill 15 hours every week (the same as Maddow, Olbermann and Schultz put together) with Scarborough?

And for what its worth, I actually watch Maddow not for a liberal slant, but because she strives to actually present the news, not propaganda. But that seems to be a dying breed in your industry, doesn't it?

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Oh boy. Anyone remember this incident from back in 2007?

From digby-- Tucker Carlson: He-man:

He's a he-man if you think telling completely unbelievable stories about how you used to beat up gay's for hitting on you to be "he-man" activity, which he apparently does.

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And from Media Matters-- Carlson claimed that after incident in a public bathroom, he assaulted the man who "bothered" him:

On the August 28 edition of MSNBC Live, hosted by MSNBC general manager Dan Abrams, Tucker Carlson, host of MSNBC's Tucker, asserted, "Having sex in a public men's room is outrageous. It's also really common. I've been bothered in men's rooms." Carlson continued, "I've been bothered in Georgetown Park," in Washington, D.C., "when I was in high school." When Abrams asked how Carlson responded to being "bothered," Carlson asserted, "I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the -- you know, and grabbed him, and ... hit him against the stall with his head, actually."

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So who better to join Steve Doocy on Fox and Friends to discuss an elementary school curriculum that teaches children not to commit violence based on sexual orientation? Tucker would rather have everyone be afraid of "teh gay".

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You knew it was going to happen. For all his big talk about being happy to talk to the House Judiciary Committee looking into the conviction and incarceration of Don Siegelman, when push came to shove, you had to know that Karl Rove would never, ever freely respond to the HJC subpoena. CQPolitics:

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, cited executive privilege as the reason that the former White House adviser would not appear before the Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee on July 10.[..]

"Mr. Rove will respectfully decline to appear before the Subcommittee on July 10 on the grounds that Executive Privilege confers upon him immunity from process to respond to a subpoena directed to this subject," Luskin wrote.

Luskin renewed an offer that would have Rove submit to an off-the-record, untranscribed interview or answer written questions about the Siegelman case, but not the broader issue of the politicization of the Justice Department.

Not even man enough to stand up for his actions. Hear that, Karl? Not even man enough. Dan Abrams brings NYU Law School Professor Michael Waldman and former HJC counsel Julian Epstein to discuss the latest in Bush League (In)Justice:

Abrams: Okay, Michael, let me start with you: it is clear, Karl Rove is not coming. I mean, the House Judiciary Committee can say as much as they want, we're still hoping, we're still encouraging him to come, we're still insisting that he come, he's not coming. So what do they do now?

Waldman: Well, it's really quite remarkable, as you say, you can just say no to a lawful subpoena from Congress. Congress has a bunch of tools they can use. They can, of course, throw him in jail. There's a jail in the basement of the Capitol. That's probably the extreme remedy. There's all kinds of other things. They can cut off funding, they can hold up nominations, they can bring a lawsuit as has been the case in the Miers...the Harriet Miers contempt case. But what Congress has to have when it looks in its toolbox is not any of these tools but some backbone. Congress is a co-equal branch of government and it needs to stand up for its rights in this.

Backbone in Congress? What's that? I'll believe it when I see the perp walk.

(h/t Heather)

On Verdict with Dan Abrams, Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter was fed up with the ridiculousness of the continued smear of Michelle Obama over her "proud of her country" statement and accuses conservative talk show host Lars Larson of promoting an agenda that tries to paint Michelle Obama as an angry, black woman, noting that there was no such outrage for John McCain's repeated statement that he "didn't love America until (he) was deprived of her company".

ALTER: Yeah, you're saying...you're just talking trash and nonsense. And it's a slur, and it's really, it's frankly kind of appalling that you and others would stoop to this level, because it's not true. You don't know Michelle Obama; you haven't spoken to her as I have. To many of her friends: black, white, many different people...let me just quickly try to dispense with this. You're taking her out of context intentionally. You're trying to twist her words for your own political purposes. It's low and it's borderline racist.

On "Verdict" last night, former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura made the perfect case as to why same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue and that the federal government has no right to tell you "who you can fall in love with." I was just waiting for Buchanan's head to explode.

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VENTURA: "Well, first of all, I made a statement when I was governor and stand by it today. Love is bigger than government. Who the hell are we as a government to tell people who you can fall in love with? I think it‘s absurd that fact it‘s even being debated. "

I couldn't have put it better myself, Governor.

Full transcript below the fold:

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Dan Abrams--most recently GM of MSNBC--looks at the laughably petulant and childish insinuations being made at FOXNews about Chris Matthews, moderator of last night's GOP debate. Apparently, the team over at FOXNews is incensed that Tweety would dare to say anything about the White House trying to control the flow and framing of the news and thereby taint George Bush as being anything less than the masterful Commander in Chief they say he is.

So what is the propaganda arm of the White House to do? Suggest that Chris Matthews is too liberal to be an unbiased moderator for the Republican debate, unlike their fair and balanced Sean Hannity and Brit Hume. Be still my gag reflex.

On Monday night, host Dan Abrams spoke with Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Pat Buchanan and Air America Radio host Randi Rhodes about the recently revealed Bush DoJ secret 2004 torture memos. The Democratic leadership, including Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman and Jay Rockefeller, have all denied having seen the secret memos, but admit they were briefed on operational details (whatever that means) which leads Abrams asks the question -- did the Democrats know more about Bush's torture techniques than they were letting on, and if so, why didn't they speak out sooner?

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Abrams and Buchanan essentially try to turn this around and blame the Democrats, concluding they MUST have known about the torture techniques in the program, labeling them as hypocrites for not speaking out about what they knew. Unbelievable. There's so much misinformation and misdirection being thrown about. So even though the Democratic leadership have spoken out (Randi Rhodes brings up Senator Rockefeller's concerns about the program), just because Bush said they were fully briefed must mean they were...and we all know how forthcoming this administration has been. Buchanan seems less disturbed by the notion of our country torturing people (watch him throw out Jack Bauer hypotheticals--including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to just about everything under the sun while being tortured) than trying to find a way to pin it on the Democratic majority in Congress.