CNN has been hyping the return of Crossfire for months, but given the ratings the first week, it seems the public wasn't buying it.
Quite the contrary, numbers reported by The Wrap Monday show this not so new venture by the supposedly most trusted name in news is a bomb of epic proportions.
One of the worst things a reviewer can say about a television program is that "it has potential,” which usually means the show's not utilizing much of it. That situation was played out on Monday, when the Cable News Network brought back “Crossfire,” a conservative-liberal debate program that had been in television limbo for eight years.
Despite a newsworthy discussion topic -- the fate of Syria, where chemical weapons may have been used by the government on rebels -- and two well-known hosts, GOP former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Stephanie Cutter, deputy manager of President Barack Obama's re-election campaign, critics were not impressed by the first edition of the 30-minute weeknight series.
Chuck Todd doesn’t have a lot of respect for members of the GOP.
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe Monday, NBC’s Chief White House correspondent accused “about half the Republican field from 2012” of “simply [running] for exposure to get a talk show, or for exposure to get a radio deal, or a columnist, or a deal with Fox” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Here's a headline I doubt many Americans imagined ever seeing:
"CNN Schedule Changes: Less Wolf Blitzer, More Newt Gingrich"
Such appeared at The Wrap Tuesday.
After more than eight years since the cancellation of “Crossfire” in June of 2005, the once-popular debate program returned to the Cable News Network on Wednesday as a segment of that evening's “Piers Morgan Live” with a spirited debate about the U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding California's Proposition 8 and the dismissal of part of the Defense of Marriage Act.
The first new debate between conservatives and liberals featured Republican Newt Gingrich stating that the eight million voters who approved the proposition “have a pretty good reason to feel a little more alienated from Washington than they were yesterday.”
Piers Morgan normally gets around 500,000 people to watch his pathetic show on CNN.
Despite this, the man few Americans actually know by name had the nerve to say Wednesday that conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh is “too old and too boring” to be a regular on CNN’s revival of Crossfire (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):
Reports have already surfaced that CNN plans to resurrect the debate show Crossfire. Now the network is reportedly talking to Newt Gingrich and former Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter to be two of the co-hosts.
Crossfire was canceled in 2005 after running for 23 years. In 2010 CNN drew from a similar debate formula and paired columnist Kathleen Parker with disgraced former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer for the ill-fated Parker-Spitzer, which fizzled out in less than five months.
Amidst the liberal media's fixation on Pope Francis upholding Catholic teaching on sexuality, Newt Gingrich knocked their wishes of liberal "reform" on Wednesday's Piers Morgan Live.
"I am amazed at how much western elites translate reform into sex. If it doesn't relate – if it doesn't relate to sex, it doesn't count," he told host Piers Morgan, who then ludicrously claimed that "if you are gay, and you want to be Catholic, at the moment, you are basically demonized." [Video below the break. Audio here.]
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich made a statement on ABC's This Week Sunday that will turn heads on both sides of Capitol Hill and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
"An Obama immigration plan is not going to pass the House" due to "the level of hostility towards the president and the way he goads the hostility."
Viewers who tuned in to Wednesday's The Situation Room were bombarded with over five times as much coverage of gun control advocates than of the lone gun rights advocate Newt Gingrich.
Host Wolf Blitzer tossed plenty of softball questions to gun control advocates Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Mark Kelly, husband of former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.), but he grilled Gingrich on background checks.
Newt Gingrich on Thursday night interrogated the gun-grabbing Piers Morgan, pushing the CNN host as to what his real motives are. An aggressive Gingrich insisted, "So, why don't you share your real view?...Isn't your real view that you would ban pistols if you could?" [See video below. MP3 audio here.] The Republican also told the British anchor why the Founding Fathers were able to defeat "your army."
Morgan swore that his concern was "the high-powered guns of any variety which can fire 30 or 40 or more rounds in less than a minute." He added, "...That would be my primary concern right now." The former Speaker pounced, "Right now? Okay, right now." Gingrich lectured, "The reason you find so many of us very reluctant to go down this road is we believe each step down this road leads to the next step and the next step and the next step."
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is rarely at a loss for words, unless what he says is edited by Rachel Maddow.
On her cable show last night, Maddow swooned in response to MSNBC colleague and avowed "extreme left" socialist Lawrence O'Donnell's alleged success in an exchange with Gingrich on "Meet the Press" this past Sunday. (video clip after page break)