CNN rewrites ethics rules to accommodate swindler Newt Gingrich

[DonViejo]

CNN's conflict of interest rules suddenly get a lot looser for one "Crossfire" co-host

BY ALEX PAREENE

Congratulations, CNN, you managed to hire Newt Gingrich, one of America’s most beloved historian-grifters. Now he’s your problem. The new “Crossfire” has only just begun, and CNN is already trying to explain how and why Gingrich is exempted from the cable news channel’s ethics policies.

When CNN relaunched their storied professional arguing program this year, they decided the show would be hosted, half of the time, by former Obama campaign (and administration) communications professional Stephanie Cutter, and former Republican presidential candidate and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Unlike most past Crossfire hosts, Cutter and Gingrich aren’t professional journalists or commentators. Their work experience is in politics itself, not political media. They are explicit partisans, in other words. That makes for bad TV, obviously, but it also makes for bad public relations, when the professional pols continue to act like professional pols, because that is what they are. In Stephanie Cutter’s case, that means assisting the White House in its attempt to convince the press and the public that Larry Summers is a great man who would be a great Fed Chair. In Gingrich’s case it means grifting everyone all the time.

After leaving Congress in disgrace, Gingrich spent years slowly and carefully repairing his image — he became Newt Gingrich, Ideas Man — and cashing in on that image as much as possible. Few were better at recognizing and taking advantage of the fact that the conservative movement is a self-perpetuating fundraising machine. Gingrich Inc. pulled in $100 million doing almost nothing of concrete value for anyone but Newt. Speeches, consulting, publishing, filmmaking, and fundraising-for-the-sake of fundraising made Gingrich a rich man.

Gingrich’s 2012 race was pretty obviously intended, at least initially, to boost his profile and hence his earning ability, but he seems to have gotten a bit full of himself and taken it too far, ending up deep in debt and forced to shutter some of his lucrative businesses. He’s climbing back out of that hole and reestablishing Newt Inc., and CNN is apparently willing to rewrite its own ethics guidelines in order to help him get back to doing what he does best, which is extracting money from suckers.

full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/27/cnn_rewrites_ethics_rules_to_accommodate_swindler_newt_gingrich/