The most thoughtful and thought provoking show on CNN International in Asia these days is Fareed Zakaria GPS, airing Sunday night at 8pm Hong Kong time, a few hours before it’s shown in the US. This week, Zakaria’s program featured a segment on the Iranian election with a pair of Iran-born scholars and former top US Middle East diplomat Dennis Ross.

Rather than let us hear these smart people’s insights on Iran, CNN chose to continue its live feed of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s press conference complete with sycophantic questions and polemic replies – long after even Al Jazeera International dropped it. The network finally relented about 15 minutes into GPS’s scheduled broadcast time, so viewers enjoyed some of the panel’s intelligent analysis.

But after about 30 minutes, CNN decided we’d seen enough. It interrupted the program again, under the banner of “Breaking News,” not for more of the news conference or live pictures of protests by those disputing Ahmadinejad’s reported win. No, CNN interrupted GPS to bring us Christian Amanpour, who was at Ahmadinejad’s news conference, complete with snazzy red head scarf, to summarize what CNN International viewers had forced to watch for most of the past two hours.

It wasn’t enough to see it once, we had to suffer through Amanpour blathering about this non-event.he insult to CNN-I’s Asian viewers is multiplied because here, unlike other regions, GPS doesn’t have a reasonable rebroadcast time for us to see what we missed. Shame on CNN.

Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America’s story to the world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, financial crisis, and cheap lingerie.

by matttbastard

Update 03/23: Make sure to check out Sarah’s post on Spitzer, populism, and The Experts.

On today’s episode of Fareed Zakaria GPS, an ‘expert panel’ was convened to discuss ‘populist’ outrage in the wake of AIG and other recent scandals related to the global economic crisis. Via email, I bet Sarah a dinner at IHOP (because we be keepin’ it real like that in this economy) that the ‘expert panel’ would be tilted towards the Washington media elite–y’know, Broder,  Friedman, maybe some latte-sipping ‘even the’ liberal from TNR.  Sarah very astutely declined to take me up on that bet.

Good thing, too–I knew it was going to be bad, but this so-called ‘expert panel’ went beyond even the previously charted borders of EPIC ESTABLISHMENT FAIL .

I mean, was that ‘expert panel’ on ‘populist rage’ a joke?  Let’s see: a glibertarian blogger, a former Goldman Sachs greed peddler, and a tainted ex-Merril Lynch exec.

Seriously?

How about next time try featuring some actual, y’know, populists–labour reps, or writers like Barbara Ehrenreich or Bill Fletcher, Jr–people who aren’t stuck in the bubble of establishment Washington, who don’t purse their lips at such vulgar concepts as ‘populism’,  ‘nationalization’ or even (gasp!) ’socialism.’   Or, as Sarah suggested, someone like our homie Erik Loomis, a Gilded Age historian whose focus is labor history and has studied in depth populist movements in the US. In other words, REAL experts on the matter of ‘populist rage’, not smug apologists for the very system that has PROVOKED the white-hot ire of the general public.

At the end of the segment, Zakaria guilelessly requested that viewers write in if they felt the panel didn’t contain enough populist outrage “and we’ll see what we can do to correct that”. Dude, there was NO populist outrage–period.  Jesus fucking wept — talk about a glib cocktail party sneer from the woefully-out-of-touch establishment.

Pitchforks. Pikes. Tumbrils.

Take action: Contact Fareed Zakaria GPS and (politely but firmly) let them know that you want to see REAL experts on populism represented in any purportedly ‘expert’ panel.

Recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers

Fareed Zakaria, pundeditor of Newsweek International, has a new show debuting on CNN next Sunday, Fareed Zakaria–GPS.

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Maureen from Penguin passed on word that Betsy Alexander has been named a senior producer for CBS’ The Early Show.  She will oversee lifestyle segments.

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Joan Stewart of The Publicity Hound Blog lists some services that send out reporter queries.  You have to pay for some of them (like Profnet) but others are free, so you may want to check them out.  I find these services particularly helpful for backlist titles which I can’t be actively pitching.

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Chris Brogan offers some basic blogging tips including the tone of a blog, how often one should post, linking, commenting, etc.