When I lived in San Francisco one of my smartest, most urbain and savviest friends was Susan Klein. She kind of idolized her kid brother Jonathan, who had graduated magna cum laude from Brown and gone on to work at CBS News. I always had the idea he was just as smart, urbain and savvy as Susan. Apparently the folks at CNN thought so too. In 2004 they made him president of CNN US , "responsible for management oversight of all programming, editorial tone and strategic direction of the network." Aside from a couple of Emmy awards, this guy actually did win a Peabody. And now he's responsible for CNN's editorial tone in the U.S.I don't think I ever met Jonathan though I feel like I know him, at least enough to be certain that-- other than the way I liked Cher when I ran her record label-- he doesn't like Lou Dobbs one bit. Lately he's been damaging his reputation -- like damaging it -- by publicly defending Dobbs. He has bosses too and Dobbs' extreme Know Nothing editorial tone attracts a certain crowd that would otherwise be busy watching Fox-News or reading Ku Klux Klan one sheets. Advertisers get measurements of their presense, not measurements of the absense of millions of former or might have been CNN viewers who now watch MSNBC or get their news even less corporately.The editorial tone Jonathan is responsible for, at least on paper, is now so poisonous and hateful that it's impossible to mention malevolent, treasonous figures like O'Reilly, Beck , Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage and Ingraham without, in the same breath also mentioning CNN's Lou Dobbs. His show is repulsive , the way Joseph McCarthy was repulsive and the B.A. Jonathan Klein earned-- summa cum laude-- at Brown was in history. So he knows.If Jonathan Klein is unable to self-police, no one can. It's impossible. Society will either disintegrate into a brutish reactionary mob ruled by the Law of the Jungle or it will figure out a way to protect itself from this: Racism is not acceptable, not in America in 2009-- and not as a tactic in a Big Money war against health care reform. We-- our nation-- has to do something about the way the public airwaves are being used to brutalize the population.

Labels: CNN, Jonathan Klein, Lou Dobbs, media