In today's Wilshire & Washington, the pundits take on the punditry! With special guest Matt Lewis, conservative analyst and a writer for Politics Daily, we launch ourselves into the controversy that was Fox News' exclusive interview with President Obama earlier this week with Bret Baier. There were certainly a lot of interruptions, but was the interview by Baier "disrespectful," as a number of commentators on the left have claimed? Nothing new came out of the interview, but isn't it a win for everyone to talk about these issues openly? Isn't challenging the administration the job of journalists in general? And wasn't the whole "War on Fox" a bad idea to begin with? As Lewis puts it, it was probably the best interview he'd seen in a while where no news is broken. We wade hip-deep in to the latest Glenn Beck controversy - his attack on churches supporting social justice, meriting in a 15-minute parody by Jon Stewart. Can Beck ever really jump the shark at this point? There's an impression that Beck appeals only to yokels in flyover states, but if you think about it, he is raising a lot of questions that are rarely spoken about on cable news. He may be nuts, and his facts might occasionally not be right, but this "bottom-feeder" is bringing up some fundamental questions about American politics. The big question is: Is it real? How much of Beck is schtick and how much is sincere? And if it ever comes out that Beck is just playing the Right like a fiddle - like what happens in the movie classic, "A Face In A Crowd" - what will happen? Finally, we talk about the latest hiring at CNN, Erick Erickson, a conservative blogger from RedState.com. What's fascinating here, despite all the complaints from liberals, is that a blogger who was not a politician, pundit, or journalist has broken through the glass ceiling and into the mainstream media. Shouldn't this be applauded by the blogosphere, even if Erickson is a staunch conservative?
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Wilshire & Washington, the weekly Blog Talk Radio program that explores the intersection of politics, entertainment, and new media, features co-hosts Ted Johnson, Managing Editor of Variety; conservative blogger Teresa Valdez Klein (www.teresacentric.com), and liberal blogger Maegan Carberry (www.maegancarberry.com). The show airs every Wednesday at 7:30am PST on BlogTalkRadio.com.