I think you’re right to be disappointed in CNN too. Aside from some of Anderson Cooper’s work (on Katrina, etc.) and the occasional commentary I see from Jeffrey Toobin, David Gergen & Donna Brazile, I’ve found the network almost completely unwatchable of late. For me, it is due, at least in large part, to what seems to be a predominance of journalism-as-stenography. One of their folks who is almost uniformly guilty of this practice is Wolf Blitzer; I literally cannot even stand to watch him at all, and almost always changed the channel any time I wandered over to CNN during election coverage and he turned up for more than 10 seconds.

Some of their (amazingly huge) political panels during the primaries and post-debate coverage were interesting, insofar as they provided a large number of views (not that they tended to differ too much amongst themselves), but they continue to give this kind of false equivalency to the competing sides of many issues (Campbell Brown being an exception), or simply serve as a platform for people (like Palin) to spout their positions without any intellectual challenge or incisive questioning of the interviewee’s statements. Perhaps they think they are walking some fine line between what they perceive as a right-leaning bias at Fox & a left-leaning bias at MSNBC, but if that is the case, I don’t think they are successfully upholding the unbiased, journalistic “center” so much as they are merely turning into a rented podium for all comers to shout their wares while a well-funded intelligentsia makes periodic remarks from the peanut gallery. Now, admittedly, I don’t watch any of their daytime programming, so since my opinion is based on evening programming-only, perhaps that is unrepresentative of the whole. But I don’t really suspect that that is the case.

[Also, I believe it is President Lula of Brazil behind Pres. Bush during the short walk (& Chancellor Merkel behind him on the podium).]