“P.S.- I Feel Sorry for Anderson Cooper”
Move Over, Keith Olbermann: The Mainstream Media has just crowned its new Drama Queen.
Greta van Susteren, the raging scientologist famous for leeching a career off of the deaths of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, is really desperate for attention, so much so that she’s willing to steal it from more accomplished journalists like Anderson Cooper, famous for leeching a career off of the deaths of thousands of poor Louisianans during Hurricane Katrina (and the whole Vanderbilt thing). After an Anderson Cooper 360º producer innocently pointed out van Susteren’s fixation (fetish?) on attractive teenage girls and murder mysteries worthy of Robert Stack doesn’t really pass for news in our day and age, van Susteren went on a rampage, accusing Cooper of such cardinal journalistic sins as being good-looking, likable, and having a sense of humor. Shameful!
And just when we thought that we had heard the first and the last of the sinister details behind CNN’s top hit, Greta strikes again- today heightening the stakes in the one-sided rivalry by accusing CNN of actually “cooking the books” to make Cooper #1! If not understanding ebonics is enough to have him banished from television forever, “cooking the books”- whatever that means- calls for the death penalty. Greta’s evidence is as sturdy as ever: since CNN has decided to stick up for its main man by calling the 10 PM slot “Anderson Cooper 360º” instead of “generic news coverage”, Anderson Cooper 360º’s ratings have risen: surprise! It appears that Fox News is too ashamed of Greta to tell Nielsen that they actually still broadcast her show, thus leading to her lower ratings. Can’t say we blame them.
And it’s hard to blame Greta herself for starting this petty catfight (which Cooper has rightfully chosen to ignore. After all, for a woman who claims to have the #1 rated cable news program in her timeslot, she’s quite an anonymous presence on the news scene- Nielsen isn’t even aware that she’s still on TV. Matt Drudge doesn’t fret when her brow is slightly more furrowed than usual; Gawker doesn’t question her sexuality (no one cares); teenage girls don’t hang her portrait in their high school lockers. Due to a mix of clever marketing, general pleasantness, a ton of money, and great looks, these are all things that are at the order of the day for Anderson Cooper. And yet it is Van Susteren who feels sorry for the adversary she viciously attacked about five words before, because he is pretty or something, and that is a fate Greta could never live with.
