Jeff Cohen in Conversation with Jimmy Tingle

Take On The Media presents a conversation with Jeff Cohen hosted by Jimmy Tingle. This event coincides with the release of Jeff Cohen’s new insider book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.

Take On The Media is a multi-dimensional campaign featuring our nation’s most credible media and intelligence experts. The objectives are to expose media bias and negligence, to provide the public with information the corporate media ignores, distorts or censors, and to support independent media.

“Jeff Cohen’s dissection of cable TV news is both irresistably funny and civically painful. It goes from uproarious anecdotes to those that make you wince.” – Molly Ivins

In his new book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media, producer, pundit, and media critic Jeff Cohen offers a fast-paced romp through the three major cable news channels (Fox, CNN, and MSNBC) and delivers a serious message about their failures in covering the most urgent issues of the day.

Television news has become a national joke and a nightly Jon Stewart punchline. Few media critics have been afforded an intimate, on-the-job view of the outlets they condemn. Cohen founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986 and in the ensuing years ended up as a paid pundit on all three cable news channels. While books have been written by journalists who grew disillusioned with TV news, Cohen was never “illusioned.”

Propelled by amusing anecdotes featuring famous pundits and media personalities, Cable News Confidential highlights the idiosyncrasies, hypocrisies, and absurdities he witnessed at news organizations run by entertainment conglomerates. In the book, Cohen

* recounts memorable on-air confrontations with the likes of O’Reilly, Falwell, Buchanan, Novak, Ben Stein, and others. (Ann Coulter refused to debate him.)

* recalls how, as terrorists plotted to commit 9/11, cable news was playing its essential watchdog role…on Gary Condit’s sex life.

* explains the odd occurrences that can happen to a leftwing media critic, on the air or in the greenroom, while on the payroll of rightwing Fox News Channel.

* offers an inside look at TV’s history of pitting fire-breathing rightists against pundits whose motto could be, “I’m not a leftist, but I play one on TV.”

* examines the orders from TV management that led to suppression and bias in the run-up to the Iraq war.

At MSNBC, Cohen was an on-air commentator, and senior producer of Donahue, until the show was terminated on the eve of the Iraq War. Before that, he was a weekly panelist on Fox News Channel’s News Watch, and briefly co-host of CNN’s Crossfire. Over the years, he has been a frequent guest on national TV and radio including The Today Show, Larry King Live, The O’Reilly Factor, C-SPAN, and NPR.

It’s often said that journalism, like sausage making, is an ugly process best unseen by those who wish to enjoy its consumption. Cohen takes readers on a fun – but not always pretty – tour inside the sausage factory of TV news.