Pajamas' Revenge: CNN's Jon Klein Fired, Finally
Kausfiles is running out of enemies: Jon Klein, the oleaginous CNN chief who has led his network from failure to failure, all the while keeping up a patter of confident, self-righteous spin, was finally sacked today. This is no time to gloat ... No, wait, this is the perfect time to gloat. If you don't kick them when they're down they might get back up! .. Klein, remember, was the man who first derided bloggers as a "guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks"--this during the Dan Rather controversy, when Klein was sucking up to his old buddies at CBS.
The pajamists won that battle, and now they've won the war: at CNN, Klein completely misread the cable news market which, thanks in part to the rise of opinionated bloggers writing what they think, now frankly rewards frank ideological cocooning (as in the Rachel Maddow show). That's not entirely a good trend. We now have degraded, over-excited political discourse. On the other hand, we don't have Jon Klein. ...
P.S.--Somewhere Tucker Carlson is smiling: Klein began at CNN by agreeing "whole-heartedly" with Jon Stewart, who'd said that one of the network's flagship shows, Crossfire, was "hurting America." A sign of things to come, with Klein promoting himself while pissing on his own troops. ...The next phase, I think, was "storytelling," with worthy policy pieces shelved if they involved graphs and charts rather than a neat plot line. ... And don't forget CNN's "emo" phase, during which guests were told to "get angry" and Klein crowned Anderson Cooper "the anchorperson of the future." ...
It's been clear for years that Klein should have fixed Crossfire rather than cancelling it. If CNN can't be the opinionated left or the opinionated right, it can be a place, now badly needed, where left fights the right in an attempt to convince the not-yet-converted. Klein made a half-hearted move in this direction with the upcoming Parker-Spitzer show, now left twisting in the wind. ...
Klein's departure is terrible news for kausfiles, which will no longer be able to get cheap items by deriding his latest preening jag. (Some of those items are colleected here.) Somebody hire him, quickly. ... 12:48 p.m.
