Cnn

On Monday night, CNN, the New Hampshire Union Leader and other sponsors will hold a debate in New Hampshire -- and Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Herman Cain, Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum will all be attending.  That's virtually every major declared Republican candidate. Except one. And that exclusion -- and the reasoning behind it -- is downright puzzling.  Meet Gary Johnson. He's a two-term governor of New Mexico. (That's one more term than Mitt Romeny and almost two terms more than Sarah Palin.)

Last week was a great one for cable news watching. Not because any one channel did such outstanding work, but rather because several stories clamored simultaneously for the camera's attention. The choices that a channel makes in such situations are usually one of the best barometers of where it really lives. After two days and nights of watching CNN ping-pong back and forth on location from the Cleveland captivity story to the Jodi Arias trial in Arizona, I can say for the first time since Jeff Zucker took over as president in January that I have a pretty good idea of where his CNN is headed day-to-day.

It would be hard to find a better lineup of celebrity performers or a bigger TV event tonight than the second annual CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute that honors ordinary people who have achieved extraordinary accomplishments in their communities and beyond. The program, which is hosted by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper from the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, will be broadcast to a global audience starting tonight at 9. Alicia Keys and John Legend headline the performers. During the show, CNN will honor 10 heroes and reveal the CNN Hero of the Year, who will receive an additional $100,000.

Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has been elected to the House (or at least that's where we hear he's going). Welcome to your trends report for Monday, May 8, 2013. Sanford will head to Capitol Hill after facing off against Elizabeth Colbert Busch, sister of the late-night satirist Stephen Colbert. Republicans will hold 233 of the House's 435 seats when Sanford is sworn in, probably this week. Another trip to the House comes today, when former diplomat Gregory Hicks is scheduled to testify about the Benghazi attacks last year.

Now that the Persian Gulf war is over, CNN has released a video on how it began."Desert Storm: The War Begins," which explores the background of the conflict and ends with the first day of actual fighting, should be in video stores and supermarkets shortly if it's not there already. Turner Home Entertainment began distributing about 300,000 copies of the 1-hour, 17-minute tape about a week ago.Anchored by Cable News Network's Bernard Shaw, the tape includes footage of war leaders such as Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, excerpts of an interview with Saddam Hussein and reporting by CNN correspondents -- including that of Mr. Shaw, Peter Arnett and John Holliman in Baghdad the first night that it was bombed.

I promised myself I was going to give CNN's new weeknight host Erin Burnett a full week of shows before I reviewed her. It was hard keeping that promise Monday night when I saw her pay a visit to the Occupy Wall Street encampment so she could look down her nose and mock the folks there. I thought it downright cruel the way she and her producer cut one kid from the herd and then tried to make him look like a fool. This was cool kids mocking outsiders on the playground, and it made me angry.

One could forgive viewers if they walked away confused after watching CNN's early coverage of the Supreme Court's health care decision. The network, itself, was confused. Within minutes after the decision was announced, CNN was hitting the airwaves with four different versions of what the ruling said. First, the network reported the justices had killed the individual mandate provision of the law -- perhaps its most controversial aspect. Then, CNN reported the law "may have been upheld.

Chris Cuomo is leaving ABC to join CNN, where he will have a "major role in a new CNN morning show," the cable channel announced Tuesday. Cuomo, who has served as co-anchor of "20/20" and chief law and justice correspondent for ABC, will also anchor and report on "major events" for CNN, Jeff Zucker, the channel's new president, said in making the announcement. “Chris is an accomplished anchor who is already an established name in morning television, as well as a widely respected investigative journalist,” Zucker said in a CNN release.

The facts of the case seem almost too brutal and cruel to bear. When a small boy in Bangladesh refuses the demands of a gang that wants to use him as a beggar, he is beaten and mutilated within an inch of his life. His throat is cut, his skull is bashed in and his penis is amputated. Sara Sidner, a correspondent for CNN International, tells the story of this boy and his family in an "Operation Hope" report that premieres this weekend. The story, which brings the boy and his family to Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital, is what separates CNN from every other cable TV news operation on the dial.

Talk about hitting the floor running, Jeff Zucker looks to have arrived at CNN this month in a flat-out sprint. It's hard not to be impressed by what he's already done: Started to make CNN suddenly seem a couple of decades younger. It's like watching an aggressive and skilled general manager rebuild a baseball team from the bottom up -- first adding younger but already tested major-league talent to the roster while releasing some one-time big names that were no longer productive.

After spending 15 hours Friday locked on coverage of the manhunt in Boston, here are my picks for the highs, lows and deeper media stories of this remarkable day and night. The best moment belonged to Diane Sawyer and ABC News for a phone interview Friday night with George Pizzuto, a next-door neighbor to the man who discovered a wounded and bloody Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lying under a tarp in a boat in his backyard and called police. The interview started at 8:02 p.m., and was the first clear explanation of how the police found the 19-year-old bombing suspect in Watertown Friday night.

Just when it was starting to look like cable news might have actually learned something from its rush-to-judgment sins in covering the Newtown massacre, John King, CNN and Fox News showed Wednesday how shaky and journalistically confused even the genre's biggest dogs are these days when confronted with a major, ongoing news story. It doesn't get much worse than it did for CNN Wednesday afternoon when quoting unnamed sources it reported that police had arrested a suspect in the Boston marathon bombings.

Al Jazeera America Thursday announced that veteran business reporter Ali Velshi will join the Qatar-owned channel to develop and host a daily prime-time business show. The announcement comes one day after news that Velshi was leaving CNN where he served as business reporter and show host for almost 12 years. Velshi's last day at CNN will be Friday, according to TVNewser. Here's the release from Al Jazeera America: Al Jazeera America, the new US-based news channel set to launch later this year, today announced that Ali Velshi, CNN's former chief business correspondent and anchor of “Your Money” and CNN International's “World Business Today,” has joined Al Jazeera America to develop and host a daily primetime business program.

Jake Tapper's new show on CNN, "The Lead," is premiering at a time when cable TV keeps moving further down the road of partisan news presentation. But ask him about it, and there's no waffling. "I am not a partisan, and I am a journalist - not an ideologue," he said in a telephone interview last week. "I want to know information. I want to force people in power to tell me the truth - whether that's a football owner, a president or a CEO. And CNN felt like the best fit to do that.

CNN and Soledad O'Brien Thursday announced a new deal that will take her out of the morning weekday anchor chair and make her an independent producer of documentaries for the channel. The move by new CNN chief Jeff Zucker is a smooth one that keeps a talented journalist connected to the CNN brand while paving the way for the one-time executive producer of the "Today" show to launch a weekday morning show of his own design featuring Chris Cuomo and most likely Erin Burnett, who is now struggling in the ratings weeknights at 7 p.m. on CNN. The new deal gives O'Brien, an award-winning correspondent for her work on such CNN productions as "Black in America," a guaranteed income producing non-fiction programs for the channel through a production company she will form.

All week, it's been Baltimore Ravens 24/7 on the sports channels thanks to Sunday's Super Bowl. But when it comes to cities, all the focus has been on New Orleans, the site of the game, not Baltimore or San Francisco. Tomorrow, Baltimore finally gets a little bit of face time, ranging from CNN reporting on what the Super Bowl has meant to fans in Baltimore to Natalie Morales squirrel dancing at the Inner Harbor for NBC's "Today" show. The Mayor's Office has been told by CNN that the cable news channel will air a feature on the city between 9 and 11 a.m. Friday.

CARLISLE, Pa -- CBS News anchor Dan Rather says CNN i primarily an "electronic wire service" for an elite audience that provides too little perspective for breaking news.Mr. Rather said all national TV news broadcasts -- including his "CBS Evening News" -- are "not very good as far as depth is concerned." But he contended that the major over-the-air TV broadcasts do a better job of filling in the background than does CNN."Among broadcasters, I think, Cable News is lagging at the moment in terms of analysis and background, context and perspective on stories," Mr. Rather remarked as a lecture on press coverage at the Army War College on Monday.

SAN DIEGO -- CNN cable news has become "the publicist for an enemy propaganda film" by broadcasting a tape showing an insurgent sniper apparently killing an American soldier, the chairman of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee said yesterday. Rep. Duncan Hunter, a California Republican, called for the Pentagon to oust immediately any CNN reporter embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq. "I think Americans like to think we're all in this together," Hunter said. "The average American Marine or soldier has concluded after seeing that film that CNN is not on their side."

Talk about hitting the floor running, Jeff Zucker looks to have arrived at CNN this month in a flat-out sprint. It's hard not to be impressed by what he's already done: Started to make CNN suddenly seem a couple of decades younger. It's like watching an aggressive and skilled general manager rebuild a baseball team from the bottom up -- first adding younger but already tested major-league talent to the roster while releasing some one-time big names that were no longer productive.

Chris Cuomo is leaving ABC to join CNN, where he will have a "major role in a new CNN morning show," the cable channel announced Tuesday. Cuomo, who has served as co-anchor of "20/20" and chief law and justice correspondent for ABC, will also anchor and report on "major events" for CNN, Jeff Zucker, the channel's new president, said in making the announcement. “Chris is an accomplished anchor who is already an established name in morning television, as well as a widely respected investigative journalist,” Zucker said in a CNN release.