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The man who conceived the show, CNN U.S. president Jon Klein, was fired just 10 days before the premiere. The company's top management immediately reached out to reassure the hosts that the move didn't change CNN's support for "Parker Spitzer." CNN hopes viewers, particularly women, look beyond Spitzer's political fall from grace, when he resigned as governor in 2007 after being caught using prostitutes. Some won't be able to, said Marcy McGinnis, a former CBS News
executive now teaching journalism at Stony Brook University. But
others will be more forgiving and willing to listen to what he has
to say, she said. "You deal with it like you deal with anything else," Spitzer
said. "You try to be forthright, say I understand it. You will react
as it's appropriate. ... And I'll try to persuade you that this is a
show worth listening to." It has certainly been discussed internally and, if Spitzer
happens to be talking about another personal political scandal, he
won't shy away from acknowledging his own failings, said Liza
McGuirk, the show's executive producer. "I think Americans like to forgive people," Parker said. "Eliot's
not the first person to trip on that particular fault line. He's
been forthright and honest, and he and his family have moved through
it." For both hosts, some nerves are evident as they attempt jobs they haven't done before, like when they race through a script during rehearsal. They've both spent plenty of time in front of cameras, but being a host is different, Spitzer said. "Yes," Parker said. "He has to be nice to our guests." "We have to let our guests speak," Spitzer said. "That's a problem for you rather than me," replied Parker, whose South Carolina accent is a few speeds slower than her on-air partner. They loosely fit conservative-liberal roles, but say their opinions will occasionally surprise viewers. She's long heard criticism that she's not conservative enough. In the past month, she's written an "open letter to Muslims" that said most Americans were appalled by a Florida pastor who wanted to burn the Quran. Other columns said charges that President Barack Obama is an anti-colonialist are poppycock and said Fox's Glenn Beck "is messianic and betrays the grandiosity of the addict." "I'm a conservative but not an ideologue," she said. "There are certain people on the right who will always turn on you if you think outside of the box, and that's part of the problem the Republican Party is having right now." Those columns bring her hundreds of letters from people thanking her, saying they rarely hear from calm, rational voices, she said. "I just think there's an atmosphere out there for what we bring to the table," she said. ___ CNN is owned by Time Warner Inc.; Fox is owned by News Corp.; MSNBC is a unit of General Electric Co.
[Associated
Press;
David Bauder can be reached at
dbauder@ap.or
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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