The times they could be a-changin at the CNN political podcast where, for as long as this correspondent can remember (which isn’t that long) the major catchline has been ‘the best political podcast…from the best political team’. Throughout much of the US election this line was delivered with unstinting aplomb by Wolf Blitzer. These days, a dizzying array of correspodents have introduced the podcast, from John Roberts to Kiran Chetry (gasp! a woman) and Joe Johns, a man possessed of a most curiously elongated intonation.
Outside Blitzer, John Roberts is the most statesmanlike of the bunch and brings his own sass to the party – as he saunters on stage (occasionally without a tie, News Hour has noticed), Roberts will thrown in the additional ‘where CNN = politics’ before going onto the traditional superlatives, gesturing at the screen that reads ‘CNN = politics’ in case viewers had missed the point.
This snappier, simpler (but not better) slogan has the feel of encroaching on the old one’s space. But is this the only change afoot? Roberts recently stated that he ‘absolutely would be comfortable in being on the air not just without a tie but without a suit’. Bold stuff, qualified by a need for him to equal Barack Obama’s increasingly sculpted physique to do so. Clearly, more investigation was called for, and so CNN dispatched ‘Senior White House Correspondent’ Ed Henry to the gym, to see just what tolls Obama’s six-day-a-week workout plan would exact.
Was this Roberts’ idea? Was this a fact-finding mission for the whole team masquerading as news? Will the new year see the presenter steadily shedding more and more clothes? (He’s already proven himself happy to dump the tie – whatever next?) Perhaps a new section on ‘naked politics’ twinned with a ‘new year, new you’ lifestyle promotion that track the correspondents’ gym work on the Magic Wall.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 