On Tuesday, Turner Broadcasting, the parent company of CNN, started the process of cancelling several of the news network's series, including the reboot of Crossfire, and began laying off hundreds of employees. Chris Ariens at the TVNewser blog reported that "as many as 300, or 8%, of CNN's workforce is being cut." Ariens later noted that "Jane Velez Mitchell's nightly HLN show has been canceled, part of deep cuts at CNN."
Stephanie Cutter
By Noel Sheppard | September 18, 2013 | 10:03 AM EDT
On Tuesday, I published an article gleefully applauding the poor ratings CNN’s new Crossfire received in its first week back on the air.
After some reflection, I realize such sentiments went counter to my goal of having a truly fair and balanced media.
By Noel Sheppard | September 17, 2013 | 10:25 AM EDT
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.
By Mark Finkelstein | September 16, 2013 | 8:42 AM EDT
"You tell her. No, YOU tell her!" . . . Richard Wolffe says that in 2012 an all-male group of senior Obama campaign people got together at a White Sox game and decided to fire deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter—but didn't have the "balls" to tell her.
Maybe so. Then again, Wolffe—appearing on Morning Joe today to tout his new book on the Obama re-election campaign—also claimed that Cutter was "one of the single most effective" people in the Obama campaign? Cutter? The nasty gaffe machine? View the video after the jump.
By Randy Hall | September 12, 2013 | 9:33 AM EDT
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.
By Randy Hall | June 28, 2013 | 11:18 AM EDT
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.”
By Matt Hadro | April 25, 2013 | 5:56 PM EDT
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.
By Tom Blumer | March 13, 2013 | 3:51 PM EDT
In Monday's New York Times, in a report which appeared online late Sunday, reporters Richard W. Stevenson and John Harwood devoted considerable space to the idea that President Obama's latest "outreach" effort is primarily an attempt to "salvage a big deficit-reduction deal," and not a political ploy to show voters in the 2014 congressional elections that he's really interested in achieving a compromise when no genuine desire exists.
Steven Hayes at the Weekly Standard believes it's the latter ("For Obama, It's All About 2014"), as should anyone, probably including the reporters just cited, who is on the mailing list of Obama's permanent campaign known as Organizing For Action. On Thursday, three days before the Times reporters tried to convince America that Obama is in deal-making mode, OFA, which self-evidently tailors its message to the White House's true desire went into over-the-top scaremongering mode in an email from proven prevaricator Stephanie Cutter (bolds are mine):
By Ryan Robertson | December 13, 2012 | 5:21 PM EST
There has been no shortage of deceptive ads, factually-distorted statements, and outright fabrications from the political left over the campaign year to choose from, but leave it to the Tampa Bay Times's PolitiFact to give its "Lie of the Year" award to the Romney campaign. The now infamous "falsehood" in question was Romney's claim that Jeep was planning on moving production of some of its vehicles to China. This was in fact technically true, but PolitiFact trademarked it as its "Lie of the Year."
In a fit of glee, multiple left-leaning news outlets have promoted the proclamation, including of course, MSNBC. [video below, MP3 audio here ]:
By Matt Hadro | December 5, 2012 | 4:30 PM EST
Once again, CNN's Soledad O'Brien grilled a Republican while giving an easy interview to a Democrat. She pushed Republicans to increase taxes on Wednesday's Starting Point, but, showing her double standard, she let President Obama's former deputy campaign manager attack the GOP fiscal cliff proposals.
O'Brien told Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) that Republicans could "do some kind of a deal now and that will keep us from going over the fiscal cliff? And then you can let the tax cuts expire for the wealthy January 1st. It happens. And you can do some kind of a negotiation."
NYT Reports From Two Weeks Ago on Stephanie Cutter, the Brilliant Mind Behind Obama's 'Big Bird' Attacks
By Clay Waters | October 16, 2012 | 12:00 PM EDT The New York Times Sunday Styles profile by Amy Chozick of Obama campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, "A Messenger Who Does the Shooting," reads as a bit behind on current events (many Sunday profile-type pieces are written several days in advance).
It comes off like a snapshot from before Cutter shamelessly politicized the Libya attack last Thursday by suggesting the only reason anyone cared about Benghazi was the Romney-Ryan campaign. And Chozick must have written the profile during that extremely brief time when the Cutter-inspired emphasis on Big Bird seemed hip and clever, not desperate and out of touch.
CNN's Baldwin Enables Stephanie Cutter to Blame Team Romney for Making Libya 'the Political Topic It Is'
By Matt Hadro | October 11, 2012 | 5:07 PM EDT
Stephanie Cutter ignited a firestorm when she blamed Team Romney on Thursday for making the Libya fiasco into the "political issue" it has become, but CNN's Brooke Baldwin enabled her gross political accusations by calling the Libya controversy a "political circus."
"No doubt this has absolutely turned in to a political circus, whatever political aisle you're looking at," Baldwin began the interview. Cutter then used those exact words in her first response: "Paul Ryan has politicized and made it a political circus all over this country of the terrible tragedy that happened in Libya."