Unless you happened to sleep all week, you probably saw the story of a Colorada University student getting her picture taken with President Obama at a bar in Boulder.
Even funnier than the photo that went viral on the internet was CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield gasping on Thursday's Early Start when the co-ed in question wouldn't say she was voting for the current White House resident (video follows with transcript and commentary):
You'd think on the very day an NBC News producer was fired for editing George Zimmerman's 911 call to make it appear he was racist media members would be extra careful to be as factually accurate as possible when reporting on the Trayvon Martin shooting.
CNN's Ashleigh Banfield clearly didn't get this memo for while substitute-hosting on Anderson Cooper 360 Friday night, she twice falsely claimed that an eyewitness she had just interviewed said the person she believed was the attacker - meaning the one on top during the fight near her house - was Hispanic (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Railing against radio hosts demeaning women, CNN's Ashleigh Banfield called liberal radio host Ed Schultz a "conservative," implying that conservative talking heads are the ones acting sexist and degrading women. Banfield, on CNN Monday morning, directed her ire at conservatives while not once hitting liberals for vile verbiage.
"I was called a slut by Michael Savage, a conservative radio talk show host. Laura Ingram has been called a slut by another conservative, Ed Schultz, on MSNBC," Banfield ranted. "Cut it out! It's not appropriate. It's disgusting," she railed against conservative radio hosts in light of Rush Limbaugh calling Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke a "slut" last week.
While Mitt Romney is polling strong in Nevada – as her own network had reported – CNN's Ashleigh Banfield still questioned how anyone in the state could "connect" with him over his laissez-faire approach to the foreclosure crisis. Banfield's question came at the bottom of the 1 p.m. hour of Friday's Newsroom.
The CNN host dismissed Romney's free market solution as hurtful to his own campaign, as if Nevada voters might not support such a remedy for the housing market.
Bill Clinton has done hundreds of TV interviews since leaving office in 2001, and journalists have very rarely found it appropriate to revisit his sex scandals. But for CNN, Republicans merit an entirely different standard of coverage.
On Monday's Early Start, co-host Ashleigh Banfield insisted to Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) that "I got to" bring up his 2007 prostitution scandal, so she could ask how Newt Gingrich could "manage the baggage" of his personal sex life. Vitter fired back that "the good news is, in America, it's not up to CNN" how the GOP presidential nominee is chosen.
"Hi! Is this Mary Todd Lincoln? It is? Sorry for waking up before 6 A.M. but this is Ashleigh Banfield of Early Start and I just want you to know we are live on the air so, please, No F-bombs. Hee! Hee! Anyway, I know how much you love watching plays so I want to ask if you are still haunted by the assassination of your husband who was sitting right next to you at Ford's Theater."
Is this some sort of sick fantasy on the part of your humble correspondent? Not really because that is pretty much the tone of the prank phone call made by Ashleigh Banfield on the inaugural CNN Early Start show last week when she woke up Kerry Kennedy to ask if she is still haunted by memories of the assassination of her father, Robert F. Kennedy, which you can see in the video below the fold.
Potential presidential candidate Donald Trump, whose controversial stance on President Obama's birth certificate has made waves in the mainstream media during the past weeks, for one reason or another, has avoided interviews on CBS's morning and evening news programs so far in 2011. In fact, Trump hasn't done an interview on either The Early Show or CBS Evening News in over two years.
On Wednesday's AC360 on CNN, ABC's Ashleigh Banfield punted on Nir Rosen's offensive Tweets against CBS's Lara Logan and tried to explain them away: "We're using a lot of electronics to get information out as fast as we can nowadays before we can really digest the ramifications of what we say...And so, I'm certainly not going to cast aspersions on Mr. Rosen. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
Anchor Anderson Cooper turned to Banfield and Salon.com's Joan Walsh immediately after playing his taped interview with Rosen during the 10 pm Eastern hour. Cooper first asked Walsh for her take on the controversy, and she promptly criticized the disgraced journalist: "I thought it was horrible, Anderson, and I assumed that he was making light of a sexual assault...So, I'm not going to call him a liar. Only he knows what he knew. But it was incredibly insensitive, and even...aside from the sexual assault aspect, to be mocking someone that you don't like who has been injured and mistreated, I would rather think that we don't have those responses...Maybe that's naive of me."
Good Morning America's Ashleigh Banfield on Sunday spun Bill Clinton's continuing attack on talk radio as a "war of words" between the ex-President and the "right-wing polemics [sic]." The former MSNBC host joined ABC in 2009 after a bitter departure from that cable network. [Audio available here.]
On Sunday, Banfield provided no ideological description for Clinton. Yet, regarding Rush Limbaugh and other conservative voices, she complained, "And [Clinton] has really entered- I like to call it cable chaos- the war of words over the right-wing polemics [sic], with regard to the language that's been used lately, especially leading up to this anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing."