Ah, yes, journalistic professionalism! Those were the days! Walter Cronkite may have been a Democratic party mouthpiece when he wasn’t slamming the Vietnam war, but he never called Spiro Agnew a “dick,” at least in public. Neither did Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Howard K. Smith or Barbara Walters. But that cute Anderson Cooper on CNN, he’s the face of broadcast journalism today and one of the cool kids, so he can talk like this while he was arguing about DOGE attacks on FEMA on a news show that airs coast-to-coast (this happens right before the two minute mark in the video above)…

COOPER: Some of the details, like millions for hotels, it’s actually not…

CHRIS SUNUNU: You mean the FEMA money for migrants? That’s OK now?

COOPER: I’m not saying it’s OK, don’t put words in my mouth. Don’t be a dick!

Niiiice. Of course, Chris Sununu is a former state governor, but he’s a Republican and conservative, so by definition he’s a dick in Cooper’s assessment. (Would Cooper ever call Adam Schiff, Jaimie Raskin or Chuck Schumer a dick?) And he even used the Left’s current official cover-word for “illegal immigrants who have no right to be in the United States, getting benefits and dropping anchor babies“! Why would Anderson get personal over a policy debate? In fact, what business is it of a broadcast journalist to be taking a side in a partisan policy discussion at all? It isn’t. But Cooper was trying to claim the accusation that FEMA spent $59 million on New York City luxury hotels was misleading, so Sununu responded by pointing out that the money was spent to house illegals rather than disaster victims, one of FEMA’s scandals that came out last year. (That one was before a FEMA administrator revealed that the agency was instructed not to provide aid to hurricane-damaged homes if it they had Trump-Vance signs outside.) Lacking the wit to come up with a viable retort and forgetting that his job is supposed to be informing the public rather than doing everything he can to bolster Democrat political agendas, Cooper resorted to potty mouth in his desperation.

So he apologized: I don’t care, it shouldn’t be good enough to keep his job. Keith Olbermann, demented and as full of anger-management issues as he is, never called Dick Cheney or George W. Bush a “dick” in his nightly rants on MSNBC. Rush Limbaugh managed to be tough on liberals and Democrats without calling them dicks. The nastiest Don Imus ever got was to call a politician a “weasel.” Anderson Cooper proved he is uncivil, unprofessional and too biased and emotional to be trusted.

Of course, most of that he proved to me long ago: he’s a hack. He’s a pretty hack, and he’s smarter than the now-ousted Chris “Fredo” Cuomo and Don Lemon, but that’s faint praise. It wasn’t too long ago that a talking head calling a guest a “dick” on the air would be guaranteed a suspension by any respectable news organization.

True, CNN is not such an organization any more: witness the fact that in the panel discussion that prompted Anderson to go all Andrew Dice Clay was Jeffrey Toobin, whose most memorable professionalism breach was masturbating during a Zoom chat. Eh, no big deal! CNN still employs him, and now, we learn, he is joining the opinion stable of The New York Times. Of course he is: the Times’ mandatory asshole percentage had fallen as a result of Charles M. Blow and Paul Krugman leaving, so it seemed an ideal time to whip out Toobin.

But I digress; sorry. Some final observations…

• If the election wasn’t sufficient to let the news media know that their all-in decision to support a single party no matter how inept and corrupt it is wasn’t working, then I don’t know what will. MSNBC is, if anything, more shrill, hateful and deranged than ever.  (After the CNN snippet, we can see Nicole Wallace, a typical MSNBC operative, calling Musk the “co-President.”) With the exception of two or three tokens, CNN’s day is filled with angry women and blacks glaring at the camera as they spit venom about Trump and Musk. J.D. Vance embarrassed Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation;” “Meet the Press’s” DEI hostess is even dumber and more biased than Chuck Todd, which I didn’t think was possible; George Stephanopoulos got caught lying to cast Trump as a rapist before the election.  CBS disgraced itself with the “60 Minutes”  attempted rescue of Kamala Harris, and the Washington Post is operating on fumes. Meanwhile, the Trump White House is throwing the AP out of its briefings, and high time too.

If the news media is capable of reforming in time to avoid becoming irrelevant, it had better get going. I don’t know that they have it in them.

• Cooper’s meltdown may just be more evidence that the Axis is hysterical, in disarray, and desperate. I watch Fox News, CNN and MSNBC all at once, and it’s hilarious; Fox is flanked by grim-faced, angry, shouting talking heads with chryons condemning Trump and Musk floating by, and in the middle, Fox blondes, hosts and contributors are beaming and laughing it up. Periodically, on the left side of the screen where CNN hangs out, I see Harry Enten show polling numbers indicating that the public is generally favoring how Trump has governed since taking on the challenge, as Jake Tapper looks like he’s having an appendicitis attack, or token conservative Scott Jennings smirking as he’s made another furious CNN BIPOC blow a gasket.
• Sununu, who has never been a strong Trump supporter, was burying Cooper in reality. If he had any integrity, Cooper would have acknowledged that what Sununu was impressed with was, in fact, impressive. Instead he defaulted to lame deflections. That’s what hacks do.