CNN is Buzzzing

CNN Gets Buzz It Wants (if Not the Way It Wants)

By Brian Stelter
Published: January 4, 2009

Acting not unlike many New Year’s Eve partygoers who pushed the revelry a little too far, CNN woke up on Jan. 1 with a tinge of regret.

Not that it was not worth it. CNN got the buzz it was seeking. Resembling MTV more than a cable news network, CNN’s two-hour live countdown included eyebrow-raising performances by the band Lynyrd Skynyrd, whose lead singer displayed a Confederate flag, and by the rapper Lil Wayne, whose backup dancer put on a risqué pole-dancing show.

Most notable were its colorful and sometimes cringe-worthy jokes from the comedian Kathy Griffin, including one vulgarity that was edited from later rebroadcasts. Her comments quickly became a viral hit on YouTube and prompted criticism from one of CNN’s competitors.


Ms. Griffin was paired with the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper for the 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. broadcast on the media platform in Times Square. The show was an attention-grabbing example of CNN’s continuing effort to draw younger viewers with the help of Mr. Cooper, the blue-eyed 41-year-old anchor. His 10 p.m. program, “Anderson Cooper 360,” was higher-rated than the same hour on Fox News Channel last year among younger viewers, representing a rare win for the normally second-place CNN.

But it was Ms. Griffin, not Mr. Cooper, who attracted most of the attention on New Year’s Eve. Near the end of the show she shouted a vulgarity at a nearby heckler while Mr. Cooper tried to go to a commercial break. CNN later said that the comment was inappropriate.

“She did not know she was on the air at the time and we removed it from the rebroadcast,” Christa Robinson, a spokeswoman for the network said in a statement.

Epithets are uttered on occasion in the live world of cable news. Because the decency rules that govern broadcast stations do not apply to cable channels, the incident is not expected to cause any lasting harm for CNN. Ms. Griffin’s presence may have had the opposite effect by drawing a youthful audience for the broadcast, said Tom Petner, the editor of the TV newsletter ShopTalk.

“Everyone is reaching to put a youth patina on their programming,” he said, especially cable news channels that tend to draw viewers in theirs 50s, 60s and 70s. Mr. Petner said that ABC, with the host Dick Clark, dominated the evening’s ratings with a preliminary average of 8.5 million viewers. “But I think CNN won the water cooler crowd and a lot of the Internet buzz,” he said.

Among 25- to 54-year-old viewers, CNN’s audience was almost twice as large as Fox’s for the two hours Mr. Cooper and Ms. Griffin were on.

Ms. Griffin also co-hosted CNN’s New Year’s special with Mr. Cooper a year ago. Production on the fifth season of her Bravo show, which showcases her publicity-seeking antics and is titled “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List,” begins this month.

Vulgarity aside, Ms. Griffin prodded Mr. Cooper during the show with quips about his colleagues at CNN, asking “Is Nancy Grace real, or is she just an angel from heaven?”

Bowing to the network’s New Year’s tradition, musical acts were interspersed with the co-host banter. Ms. Robinson, the CNN spokeswoman, said she was unaware of any complaints received by the network about Ms. Griffin or the Confederate flag tied to a microphone stand when Lynyrd Skynyrd sang “Sweet Home Alabama.” The flag is a mainstay of the band’s live performance.

As for the pole-dancing, CNN quickly cut away from the scene when it was shown live early Thursday morning and pixelated part of the dancer’s body when it rebroadcast the scene the next night in a highlight reel of the special. “You know it’s a problem when you want to show a musical act on TV, and yet you can’t actually show the musical act,” Mr. Cooper remarked immediately after the performance.

On Friday “Fox & Friends,” the morning show on Fox News, questioned whether Ms. Griffin should have been booked on what one of the hosts called a “family program.” An on-screen graphic during the segment labeled it “poor judgment” by CNN.

In another segment two hours later, the Fox co-host, Dave Briggs, said CNN needed a five-second delay, but added that “on New Year’s Eve unfortunately you can’t have it.”

Fox News broadcast what was, for some, its own cringe-inducing moment in the early hours of 2009. Among the text messages from viewers that scrolled along the bottom of the screen was one saying, “let’s hope the magic negro does a good job.” The message was an apparent reference to a parody song, “Barack the Magic Negro,” that was broadcast on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in 2007. A Fox executive told the blog TVNewser that the message was “inadvertently cleared for air.”


A version of this article appeared in print on January 5, 2009, on page B1 of the New York edition.