CNN Defends Airing Bachmann Response
Politico reports:
Rep. Michele Bachmann may fall into that media-savvy cadre of politicians who, as the saying goes, has never met a camera she didn’t like, but Tuesday night many Americans got the impression she was talking into the wrong camera.
Bachmann delivered her secondary response to the State of the Union speech into the camera of the Tea Party Express, which had invited her to speak and streamed the comments live. But to those who were watching on CNN, the only news network that made the decision to air the speech live, she appeared to be looking off-screen to the left.
It was a small technical mishap, but it caught Washington’s attention. Obama senior adviser David Axelrod began his post-speech interview with Lawrence O’Donnell with the jibe, “Am I looking at the right camera?”
The glitch became a defining moment for a State of the Union address that was marked less by what was said than by an unprecedented lack of control over who was delivering the messages and when.
This theme began more than an hour before the president took the podium, when the full text of the speech was leaked to the National Journal by a Democratic source, forcing the White House to release its own unembargoed version of the speech.
It continued during the responses, as CNN – the only news network that had made the decision to air the second, tea party response from Bachmann (R-Minn.) – put a big clock counting down the minutes until her response and then removed it when she got stuck behind the president’s motorcade, thus delaying the speech.
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