Topic: CNSNews.com
We suspect that one impetus for the Media Research Center to hire Human Events' Terry Jeffrey as CNSNews.com editor is his TV talking-head experience, which can be leveraged to promote the website. And lo and behold, Jeffrey pops up on the Sept. 19 edition of CNN's "The Situation Room."
And lest anyone think that Jeffrey's arrival means a continuation of the moderation and we'd previously noted occuring under interim editor Patrick Goodenough (now returned to the international desk), don't count on it -- as we've detailed, his record doesn't show evidence of such a thing. In his "Situation Room" appearance, Jeffrey sounded all the movement-conservative notes, criticizing Rudy Giuliani, defending Dick Cheney, and promoting the Bush administration's economic policy (except for the parts, like the Medicare prescription benefit, that "disappointed conservatives like me").
And CNS' new "On the Spot" video is apparently going to be all about trying to corner Democratic politicians on misleading claims. A group of videos posted Sept. 20 feature reporter Nathan Burchfiel buttonholing Democratic congressman on the cherry-picked claim that "violence has been down in the [Iraq] region in the past three months as a result of the troop surge" in ad hoc interviews on what appears to be the little subway system that runs between the Capitol and congressional office buildings.
Such interviews appear to be more about trying to corner the congressmen into making an embarassing off-message statement than eliciting actual useful information from them. That appears to be the one thing CNS learned from George Allen's "macaca" debacle -- its attempt to use Jim Webb's fiction against him, in conjunction with Allen's campaign, came off as the desperate move it was.
