Former CNN reporter and anchor Aaron Brown had a few choice words about the current state of cable news and his former employer in particular during his interview with Gail Shister.

Brown said that the recent international news focus plays to CNN’s strengths, but “masks its underlying weaknesses.”

“CNN can’t succeed in a world where people want news to be entertaining,” he says. “Bill O’Reilly is inherently more entertaining than anything CNN does. It’s more fun to see an action movie than read a book.”

At the same time Brown thinks that O’Reilly, Olbermann and others are nothing more than “skilled entertainers who use journalism as a canvas on which to perform.”

Brown is right on that score as most of the cable news anchors practice very little journalism but can be entertaining to watch, even the liberals.

He does pay a compliment of sorts to Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert who he said “is a better O’Reilly than O’Reilly.”

As for CNN Brown rarely minced words about the current state of the network.

First on his radar was Eliot Spitzer whom he accused of bullying his former co-host Kathleen Parker off their show:

“She’s an adult. He’s a child. He wasn’t interested in sharing the space. The weight of his personality blew her off the screen. He’s a big, bombastic cable person, but he gets his ass kicked by O’Reilly from here to the moon.”

He  went on to say that he likes Parker and thought that she should never have taken that gig.

As for Anderson Cooper, whose ratings have skyrocketed during the recent world crises, Brown was even less kind:

“I know the difference between journalism and a slogan. ‘Keeping them honest’ [tagline for Cooper’s ‘360’] is a slogan.”

Yes, but it’s a slogan the mainstream media never complain about compared to Fox’s “Fair and Balanced.”

CNN issued a response to Brown’s charges:

We wish Aaron well in his upcoming surgery, and we think viewer response to CNN’s recent coverage of historic events around the world on “Anderson Cooper 360″ and the rest of our TV and digital platforms speaks for itself.

Well at least for now.

 

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