Countdown with Keith Olbermann

EPISODE 202: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:43) SPECIAL COMMENT: Evidence mounts that CNN really did pack the audience at the Trump Town Hall, really did seed the crowd with almost nothing but Trump supporters. And it mounts that CNN let Trump choose the moderator (or at least veto other options to BE the moderator). And it mounts that CNN let Trump pick which pro-Trump talking heads appeared on CNN after the fixed Trump Rally ended. And it also mounts that CNN Chairman Chris Licht has intensified his criticism of the ONLY CNN front-facing talent to dare to even LIGHTLY criticize the decision to prostitute the network, Oliver Darcy, and that Darcy is deciding whether or not to quit before he gets fired. Chris Christie has now joined New Hampshire governor John Sununu in asserting that the 400 "Republican and independent primary voters" were not just random people with a variety of favored candidates. Christie: "CNN went in the tank to get Trump on there. They allowed him to negotiate who was going to be in that audience. And those were all Trump supporters. That was a negotiation deal that Trump did with CNN" Governor Sununu: "I knew pretty much everybody in that audience. They're all Trump supporters." CNN is already in "Quiz Show" territory. 60 years ago corruption like this led to Congressional hearings and Grand Juries. It should lead that way again. Semafor News ids now reported new details of the Licht "fear of God" meeting with his lone on-the-record in-house critic, Oliver Darcy - and potentially a far more dire outcome. Quoting Max Tani’s piece “In the aftermath of the meeting and coverage, Darcy has wondered to colleagues whether he should resign, or if he will be fired by the network...A particularly bitter pill for some CNN employees, was an anonymous comment from a Licht ally to Fox News,”unquote. That comment? Quoting the Fox report, a “source said Licht received a quote ‘ton’ of messages from CNN staffers appalled by Darcy’s newsletter… the messages, according to the source, were like quote ‘what the eff…’” So now instead of bullying and threatening Darcy, Licht instead had a quote “ally” leak to Fox, of all places, that CNN employees were all on Licht’s said and not Darcy’s. B-Block (20:04) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Troy Nehls complains about the open border. And the guy on the terrorist watch list they arrested at the open border. Which ain't open. It turns out Elon Musk's "free speech absolutism" means he's absolutely NOT going to pay for a lawyer to protect free speech in Turkey. And the Jamie Comer investigation of the Bidens is going great. Except they don't have any charges or evidence just an informant and a whistleblower and apparently they've LOST THE INFORMANT. (24:30) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Kevin Ettinger (1933-2023) C-Block (36:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: There's nothing new about a major television news operation making illicit, inappropriate deals with Republican presidential campaigns. Not only is it looking more and more like Trump did this with Licht's CNN, but I know from experience that in 2008, John McCain's campaign and the RNC demanded my head as the price of McCain showing up for the presidential debate Tom Brokaw was to moderate. Brokaw was more than happy to help them blackmail NBC. And he would later boast about it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

EPISODE 201: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN This is a new, full, 20-minute segment of the news breaking Friday night about CNN's Trump Town Hall. The closing two blocks of this podcast are repeated from Episode 200 from 5.12.23. A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: CNN's amoral anti-journalistic thug chairman Chris Licht reportedly called the network's only internal on-the-record critic of its telecast of the Trump Nuremberg rally into his office and with at least three other senior executives present, "Put The Fear Of God" into media reporter Oliver Darcy. Additional reporting indicates Licht and CNN manipulated crowd reaction at the "Town Hall" site by telling the audience how it could and could not react. Trump reportedly agreed to do the CNN event because it knew it could manipulate moderator Kaitlan Collins. The numbers don't lie: CNN primetime ratings drop 8% from pre-Trump levels. And Anderson Cooper's snide "living in a silo" remark is disproved by data: Since 2010 CNN has mentioned Trump supporters twice as much as those of all other presidential nominees and presidents combined. And Anderson is boiled alive by his friend and former CNN colleague Sunny Hostin on "The View": she says he's gaslighting us - and she's right. And most importantly: The decisions and the deciders who inflicted upon us the Trump Town Hall reflected journalistic malpractice and citizenship betrayal. Anderson Cooper’s maudlin and condescending attack on his own audience, and the silence of Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper and Erin Burnett and ALL of CNN’s reporters and commentators are MORAL failings. Ladies and gentlemen of CNN, do you STAND for anything? Does the organization MEAN anything to you? I wasn’t there on Day One but I WAS there at the end of YEAR ONE and I’m damn proud of it, and I grieve what Chris Licht has done by prostituting it. YOU are the ones, Wolf Blitzer, Jake Tapper, Erin Burnett, even Anderson Cooper up there on your high horse, YOU are the ones keeping the original noble idea – news unrestrained by the need to put on ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ at 8 PM, while making money – YOU are the ones charged by history, and your own ambitions and principals, with PROTECTING the idea of CNN, and in a broader sense, with PROTECTING journalism and in a broader sense STILL, with protecting DEMOCRACY. Are you going to DO it? Are you going to RISK something? Have you really all been working there for decades and NOT yet made enough money for the rest of your lives? Is there ANYONE at CNN willing to place their craft and their responsibility ahead of their paycheck, or… nah, let’s just let the media critic do it, by himself. Shouldn’t you go in there WITH him and say enough? Because guess what? Staying out of the fray and protecting your paycheck may work short term. May work for years. Or then again, it may not. There are a lot of ambitious anchors without any standards out there. Maybe it’d be better if you took a risk now in defense of, you know, the United States of America – even if Chris Licht DID get you fired. I mean which would you rather HAVE on your tombstone? I got fired because I protested when my network’s new paste-easting boss Chris Licht sold us out to Donald Trump? Or I got fired because they wanted to expand Kaitlan Collins Tonight… to FIVE HOURS? B-Block (24:11) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Biden really does seem poised to spring the 14th Amendment on Republican Debt Ceiling Hostage-Takers; Why is every news report calling the white man who choked another man to death on the NYC subway a "Navy veteran" rather than what they would call a person of color, something like "Crazed Subway Strangler"?  THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: There is ONE political boss still backing George Santos. There is one presidential campaign running on a promise to disenfranchise some of the people who would elect him. There is one CNN on-air person praising Kaitlan Collins' persistent impotence. C-Block (33:30 EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: The brindle mix on the kill list in New York is named, in sad irony, "Free." (34:35) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: It's his story that best fits the saga of Trump and degeneracy mistaken for power: "The Greatest Man In The World."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

EPISODE 200: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The journalistic malfeasance was so thorough, the internal staff rage so vituperative, and the on-air ratings so underwhelming, that if Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzer or Jake Tapper or all of them went into the office of Chris Licht’s boss this afternoon and said that the Trump Town Hall was the final straw and it had damaged theirs and the network’s credibility and they were walking out, Licht would be gone from CNN by Monday. Instead, Cooper blamed his own audience! He began his program last night regretting… that CNN viewers were “staying in their silos” and directing his infamous condescension to his own audience, or what’s left of it after the Trump debacle. “Now, maybe you haven’t been paying attention to him since he left office… thinking it can’t happen again…” Cooper’s premise – that to understand Trump and the threat he poses, we have to approve of CNN’s capitulation to and collaboration with him, is absurd, indefensible, and sanctimonious. Instead of using his platform to bravely recognize that the threat of Trump is paralleled within CNN by the threat of Chris Licht and the conservatives he’s prostituting the network for, instead of showing just SOME guts, Anderson Cooper decided to try to guilt whoever was left to watch CNN last night. Shame on him. The CNN town hall drew 3,308,000 TOTAL viewers, and 781,000 demo viewers. But just one hour after the Hindentrump crashed and burned live on CNN, the ratings bump was GONE. In the 10 O’Clock hour CNN was back to third place, half a million total viewers BEHIND Fox, 300,000 behind MSNBC. Three quarters of the total audience had vanished before midnight. By the ELEVEN O’Clock hour that “demo” audience of 781,000 had shrunk back to 186,000. They got nothing out of it. Nobody stayed. Nobody saw it and said “I like this new CNN. I’m going to try out their other shows. Like 'No You're Wrong Mr. President With Kaitlan Collins.'" B-Block (20:00) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Biden really does seem poised to spring the 14th Amendment on Republican Debt Ceiling Hostage-Takers; Why is every news report calling the white man who choked another man to death on the NYC subway a "Navy veteran" rather than what they would call a person of color, something like "Crazed Subway Strangler"? (23:20) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: There is ONE political boss still backing George Santos. There is one presidential campaign running on a promise to disenfranchise some of the people who would elect him. There is one CNN on-air person praising Kaitlan Collins' persistent impotence. C-Block (28:30) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: The brindle mix on the kill list in New York is named, in sad irony, "Free." (30:35) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: It's his story that best fits the saga of Trump and degeneracy mistaken for power: "The Greatest Man In The World."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

EPISODE 199: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-BLOCK (1:43) SPECIAL COMMENT: All mainstream American news organizations must today solemnly and unflinchingly look inward after what happened last night and understand that if you simply assume as CNN did that if you apply the journalistic rules of 20, 50, or 150 years ago to a candidate who will speak any lie, who will slander any person, who will manipulate any fear, who will betray any and all aspects of democracy, you will inherit the wind. CNN handed over 70 minutes of its primetime, and all of its remaining credibility, to a madman, to a criminal, to a liar, to a would-be dictator. It gave him an audience of braying cult members who gave him not one critical nor even less-than-fawning question. It gave him a moderator whom he ignored, mocked, insulted, lied to, lied about, and who in turn thought everything would be fine if she simply responded to his lies by saying “no you’re wrong.” CNN must fire its CEO Chris Licht for birthing a journalistic abomination unprecedented in American television history last night; Its new owners must sell the network whose brand they irreparably damaged last night. E. Jean Carroll needs to sue Donald Trump for the new defamatory comments he made about he last night; And moderator Kaitlan Collins needs to sue her agent for ending her career last night. Last night, CNN legitimized the lies and the feral venom of Donald Trump. And for whatever shamed remorse might leak out of that organization today and in the days ahead; for whatever sober self-reflection might be done at the New York Times or The Washington Post or the other outlets who may have now seen what happens when you apply the laws of honest journalism in a democracy to a man who will not and cannot even consider honesty or democracy; for whether or not some editor really stopped someone writing “Trump lied to and abused America for 70 minutes last night; here’s why that’s bad news for Joe Biden”…for whatever regret felt, or lesson learned.. there will be others who will look at the ratings as they come out later today and say “Did you see those numbers? We need to do one of those right away!” It was a disaster from start to finish. And the bottom line is: CNN as a credible news organization, as the FIRST credible full-time American television all-news organization - THAT'S what's finished. B-BLOCK (21:37) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: So many counts against George Santos that he, Devolder, and his drag queen persona could each get life sentences. The return of Feinstein. (24:00) IN SPORTS: NFL's new schedule: only two days a week WITHOUT any football. And you can be a top college basketball coach and use a homophobic slur and the word "Catholic" as the adjective before it and still NOT get fired? (27:34) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Which idiots scheduled their attack on the Biden family between the Santos arraignment and the CNN Trump fiasco? Alex Haley may have made up the quote that made enemies of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. And Senator Tuberville wants to make the Military safe for White Nationalists (like him). C-BLOCK (33:40) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: Beautiful young German Shepherd Lonzo may die in California (35:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Morning radio and sports fanaticism do not mix. One day a long time ago I criticized the New York Football Giants on the station that carried them. The DJ who loved them then came out into the newsroom and threatened to get me fired by 8:30 AM. But that wasn't the biggest surges. (50:00) ARTIFACTS: An actual broadcast from that era, me filling in for John Kennelly on The Ted Brown Show on WNEW Radio, 1981.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

EPISODE 198: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:43) SPECIAL COMMENT: A huge news day begins and ends with the jury finding, gee, guess what, Donald Trump IS a witch. Liable for sexual abuse against E. Jean Carroll and liable to show up on CNN tonight anyway. The CNN thing is the world coming full circle: three decades ago E. Jean Carroll was inadvertently responsible for launching both MSNBC and Fox News. George Santos has been indicted but nobody would reveal for what - unless Rep. Dan Goldman let the cat out of the bag by saying the Feds had gotten him for "election fraud." The weirdest twist: Capitol Hill Police went to Santos's office out of "an abundance of caution." Did they think he had tried to harm himself? Nothing but stern words after the Biden-McCarthy debt ceiling meeting but POTUS himself invokes the 14th Amendment and the prospect he may say he is constitutionally OBLIGATED to prevent debt default no matter which stunt McCarthy tries. Confirmation from Texas: the Allen Mall shooter WAS a white supremacist named Garcia, with Nazi tattoos, and the conspiracy theory fascists like Elon Musk are idiots. Harlan Crow, the man who owns his own pet Supreme Court Justice, may soon own a subpoena from Finance Committee Chairman Wyden after blowing him off. And there has been a Dianne Feinstein sighting! (Well no, actually, there was just a press release from her staff saying there would BE a Feinstein sighting). B-Block (20:22) IN SPORTS: A Fox Sports/WFAN Radio host may be up to his neck in it after wildly accusing the team with baseball's best record of "cheating" - without any evidence or even made-up story. Trevor Bauer gets beaten up. And the A's are moving again before they even get to Las Vegas. (23:11) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Putin tanks his own parade, Musk and Tucker Carlson join forces to make the world safe for trust fund babies, and Melania Trump endorses Donald Trump because SOMEBODY'S CONTRACT MUSTA BEEN RENEWED. C-Block (29:00) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: 8-month old puppy Bruno, on the kill list in Big Bear, California (30:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Willie Mays turns 92. Not only am I still hoping to recover from the radio interview I did with him in 1979 in which HE PRETENDED TO BE SOMEBODY ELSE, but even in the birthday stories nobody mentioned that after establishing himself as a budding big league superstar Mays missed nearly two full seasons when he was drafted into the army - while all the young white players WEREN'T. That clearly cost him a shot at breaking Babe Ruth's career Home Run record.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

EPISODE 197: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The United States of America is under attack by armed right-wing terrorists. The Texas Mall Shooter and every other one bent on killing the enemies living in their own mind might as well be Suicide Bombers, might as well be ISIS. The receipts on the Texas Mall Shooter are a mile long; he was a right wing media addict, he dedicated a hate-filled online rant to the terrorist “Libs Of Tik Tok” twitter account, he posted screenshots from the right-wing troll Tim Pool, a swastika tattoo covered those parts of his body not covered by an SS tattoo, he signed one comment with the name Adolf Hitler, he repeatedly posed in NAZI uniforms, he used a meme that suggested there were only two routes for Latino children: identify as black or become a white supremacist, and his pedigree as a right-wing, MAGA-inspired, neo-Nazi, perpetrator of stochastic terrorism, fueled by every component of Donald Trump and his coalition of hate, could not possibly be more easily discovered, more rapidly verified, more thoroughly self-convicting… and the right completely denies any of it is true. I do not know what we do about the people in a society who deny any fact that does not serve them. Only once before was the nation faced with a third or more of its citizens believing in things that were did not true and did not exist, and that was before and during the Civil War.  It sounds like madness to ask WHEN we need to consider an Executive Order declaring a State of National Emergency about right-wing terrorism but look at Allen, Texas and imagine the dozens and hundreds and thousands of Mauricio Garcias out there, becoming literally connected to the Proud Boys and a just-slightly-more-evil version of CPAC or MAGA or another Trump front group and then ask yourself what other means EXIST for us to stop a pervasive nation-wide violent suicidal reality-denying cult that looks ahead to November 5th, 2024, and sees opportunity. B-Block (15:25) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Tucker Carlson's first heavy-hitter, Conservative icon ally in his newly-launched war against Fox is BRETT FAVRE? Was he wearing pants? Junior Trump has never heard of Nick Fuentes? MSNBC took WHOSE money? (18:27) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: One of the great New York newscasters, John Roland, has died at the age of 81. By itself, his career is worthy of remembrance. But to me he in part defines my youth: when I was 19 I was an intern in his newsroom, as I witnessed for the first time the bloody transition from a mandarin of anchors, Bill Jorgensen, to Roland. It's an amazing story from an amazing newscast best remembered for the words with which it began: It's 10 PM. Do you know where your children are? C-Block (37:30) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS, PART 2: The thing is, to get my one college credit for spending the summer of 1978 working on Channel 5's "The 10 O'Clock News" and a half-hour nightly prototype of SportsCenter called "SportsPage" (with the man who a year later would anchor the first-ever episode OF SportsCenter), I had to write a very long, very blunt paper on my experience. I thought only my supervisor at Channel 5 and my professor would see it. Then, she liked it so much she made 100 copies and distributed it to her staff. Suddenly everybody knew which reporter all the producers called "Ted Baxter" and which talent drank so much that he'd be dead within five years. I still have the paper: I'll read you the highlights.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

EPISODE 196: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:43) SPECIAL COMMENT: "The first girl I walked up to," said one of the first bystanders to the scene in Allen, Texas, "was crouched down covering her head in the bushes, so I felt for a pulse, pulled her head to the side and she had no face." The cops then refused to take questions and the authorities had nothing but emotionless platitudes. We live now in a society in which our children are randomly put to death in public, with weapons of war, by Right Wing Terrorists - and the Republicans treat it as blandly as if it were all as inevitable as Bad Weather. Hurricanes, Tornados, Thunderstorms, Mass Shootings. If they show any emotion it is to tell us this is god's will or to explain we have "lost" the battle to rein in assault weapons, as the shrill screeching fascist Megyn Kelly did. The antidote to the dour acceptance of this slaughter must come from the president of the United States. He must act - by executive orders to address those peripheral areas that can at least reduce the carnage - and most importantly by stating the truth: Republicans Cause Mass Shootings. B-Block (17:00) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Judge calls Chump's bluff in E. Jean Carroll Trial, Pence gives Jack Smith guilty foreknowledge, Tucker Carlson has plans to burn down Fox, and Dick Durbin has excuses for Dianne Feinstein and John Roberts (21:45) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Ted Cruz can't tell one African-American from another, Chuck Grassley loses the thread on the "explosive" Biden document (it's the Burisma crap), and Vivek Ramaswamy is trying to bury his Fellowship. His... SOROS Fellowship. C-Block (27:00) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: Gray, in the worsening situation at the NYC pound. (28:05) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: 24 hours before Megyn Kelly's infamous tweets, of all the people who could have been walking on my New York street, who do I run into but the idiot NBC executive who gave her $69 million and tried to mainstream her. Happily I managed to avoid his gaze; as usual, Andy Lack was too busy listening to himself talk.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

EPISODE 195: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN Please note: this is the back two-thirds of Episode 194 from May 5, 2023, repeated and isolated so new listeners can get right to the Roger Bannister story without the news. If you've heard Episode 194, this'll be a re-run. Talk to you Monday! A-Block (1:30) N SPORTS: Saturday, May 6, the sports world will do what it always does on May 6: celebrate the most remarkable track and field milestone of the 20th Century (and maybe of all time). It is now 69 years since Roger Bannister became the first man to run a mile in four minutes or less. It was an accomplishment as unbelievable as the Moon Landing; so unbelievable that an editorial in The New York Times asked if it would ever be accomplished again. Roger Bannister won immortal praise, for the rest of his long life and beyond, despite racism and controversy and one minor detail. He could not POSSIBLY have been the first man to run a mile in four minutes or less. There is ample evidence of runners - other British runners in fact - performing the feat as early as 1770. And yet the history of these earlier athletes has been forgotten or erased - or deliberately purged. Why? B-Block (19:17) IN SPORTS PART TWO: The erasure of the runners who "broke" the four-minute mile barrier in the 18th Century (or earlier) was no accident. It was the deliberate result of the flourishing of the fetishization of amateurism, first in Great Britain in the 1800's, and then throughout the world through the Olympic movement. C-Block (25:30) IN SPORTS PART THREE: Sadly, the concoction by which Roger Bannister's feat 69 years ago was turned into "the first human ever, ever, since man crawled out of the ooze, to run a mile in four minutes" is more than just elitist revisionist nonsense. It also involves something even worse: blatant, obvious racism. It's an extraordinary story and you should learn the details so you can yell at everybody who tells you about the "great" Roger Bannister.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

EPISODE 194: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: TRUMP'S GLITCH SNITCH: Putting together scoops by CNN and The New York Times it sure looks like somebody - maybe Trump - is going to be charged with destroying or altering security video of the Mar-a-Lago storage room and the boxes of classified documents kept there. That could be a how-to-manual on breaking 18 US Code 1519 and when it's video or digital evidence, it often really does become a jail sentence of 20 years. And the Times says prosecutors have a cooperating witness from inside Mar-a-Lago and we don't know if that's the same snitch from last August, or a new one.  (11:00) SPECIAL COMMENT: THE SUPREME COURT: Then there's Clarence The Corrupt and Mrs. Clarence The Corrupt. The Thomas Scandals are coming so quickly now they're going to have to coordinate schedules to avoid having them collide with each other. Megadonor/Fascist Harlan Crow's flunkies admit to Pro Publica's latest from the AM, that he paid for some of the tuition for Thomas's grand-nephew (whom he was raising "like a son"). But nobody's commenting on the PM scandal: The Washington Post reports Megadonor/Fascist Leonard Leo not only steered "Another $25K" to Ginni Thomas but did so with the involvement of Kellyann Conway AND Leo instructed her to leave Thomas's name off the paperwork. And this time there is something for the Senate to do about it. Not the Judiciary Committee, but Finance: get all their tax returns and get somebody to give up Clarence The Corrupt. B-Block (19:05) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: The inaptly named Venom, on death row in NYC (20:30) IN SPORTS: Saturday, May 6, the sports world will do what it always does on May 6: celebrate the most remarkable track and field milestone of the 20th Century (and maybe of all time). It is now 69 years since Roger Bannister became the first man to run a mile in four minutes or less. It was an accomplishment as unbelievable as the Moon Landing; so unbelievable that an editorial in The New York Times asked if it would ever be accomplished again. Roger Bannister won immortal praise, for the rest of his long life and beyond, despite racism and controversy and one minor detail. He could not POSSIBLY have been the first man to run a mile in four minutes or less. There is ample evidence of runners - other British runners in fact - performing the feat as early as 1770. And yet the history of these earlier athletes has been forgotten or erased - or deliberately purged. Why? C-Block (37:20) IN SPORTS PART TWO: The erasure of the runners who "broke" the four-minute mile barrier in the 18th Century (or earlier) was no accident. It was the deliberate result of the flourishing of the fetishization of amateurism, first in Great Britain in the 1800's, and then throughout the world through the Olympic movement. And it also involved something even worse: blatant, obvious racism. It's an extraordinary story and you should learn the details so you can yell at everybody who tells you about the "great" Roger Bannister.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

EPISODE 193: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:43) SPECIAL COMMENT: CNN's betrayal of journalism, democracy and America by giving Trump editorial control over part of its primetime next Wednesday has actually gotten worse. It is intended by Trump as a precursor to a "jump start" of his relationship with the new management of CNN, and it may be intended by CNN as a precursor to a pronounced lurch to the right in primetime - maybe even an 8 PM show featuring former Tucker Carlson employee Kaitlan Collins. Barely anybody noticed that the start time for the New Hampshire "Town Hall" next week suddenly shifted from 9 PM EDT to 8 PM EDT and if you think that's trivial, think again. 8 PM is suddenly the Wild West of cable news. There are between a million and a million-and-a-half disaffected Tucker Carlson viewers looking for a new home and the signs are all there: CNN's Chris Licht wants their new home to be CNN. The network's primetime is in disarray (no CNN show is in the Top 25; the network just lost the 'ad demo' ratings to MSNBC for the first time in four years) and there would be no hesitation to shift Anderson Cooper from 8 to some later hour. There's more bad news. CNN Political Director David Chalian, living in terror of losing another job to Republican complaints, again underscores the network's intent to treat Trump no differently than any other candidate - as if there were true in any universe. And while there are finally blowbacks from within CNN against Licht's looming disaster, CNN Contributor and January 6 victim Michael Fanone says he wrote an Op-Ed for CNN's website comparing giving Trump this time on CNN to giving a deranged person an AR-15 - and CNN won't publish it. B-Block (15:53) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: Another News/TV News story continues to unfold. Most people seem to have gotten over the visceral shock of seeing Carlson assert "It isn't how white men fight" and understood that it's not the comment that got him fired but the prospect of Carlson being forced to read it aloud in court (and sending shock waves through the Fox Board and the cable carriers from which Murdoch is trying to get more money). But I'm still hearing two questions: Who leaked the text (and all those Carlson outtake videos) and Why? The Who is obvious: it's Fox. The Why should be just as clear: to dirty Carlson up. And how do I know all this? Because it's been done to me by my immediate-previous employer SIX TIMES in my career: in radio, in local TV, twice in cable sports, twice in cable news.  C-Block (28:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Since we're on the subject of cable and TV News and Fox and dirtying things up: what I learned from going out on two dates with Laura Ingraham. The second of them was a quarter of a century ago, just about this time of year. I'll let you know when I recover from it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.