After cleverly naming my blog Infotainment Rules, I’ve been writing for nearly two years about the total collapse of the pretense that television offers programming called worthy of the term “the news.” CNN prez Jonathan Klein hammers the final nails into the coffin here.

First, he decries the absence of horrifying news events (such as, I assume, tsunamis and spectacular terrorist attacks) in the year 2007, because they would have dragged in more overall viewers:

“It hasn’t been the greatest news year,” Mr. Klein said. “There haven’t been major news events that have moved the needle.

Then he says that to compete in the 8 o’clock slot (against Keith Olbermann), CNN will use its news footage to provide yucks for viewers:

Mr. Klein suggested that Campbell Brown’s new 8 p.m. show, set to debut in February, would compete by being “more talk-oriented,” by featuring fewer “formal pieces,” and by on occasion capitalizing on Ms. Brown’s sometimes-comic sensibility towards the news, à la Comedy’s Central The Daily Show. “Jon Stewart should not corner the market on innovative uses of tape,” said Mr. Klein. “He wishes he had access to the amount of material we get in every day.”

Finally, he promotes CNN’s “documentaries”—such as the God’s Warriors by Christiane Amanpour, which suggested that Jewish and Christian fundamentalists are as big a threat to the world as the Islamist freaks who like to blow up, torture, main, cripple, intimidate, and terrify innocents, Muslim and otherwise, the world over for the glory of Allah [e.a.].

Mr. Klein said that when he arrived at CNN in November 2004, he discovered a documentary team focused primarily on “arcane” subject matter.

Under Mr. Klein’s direction, CNN documentaries have married high-profile CNN reporters with equally high-profile subjects—Christiane Amanpour and religious fundamentalism, Campbell Brown and political attack ads, Anderson Cooper and the environment. Mr. Klein said he encourages his reporters to draw conclusions in their documentaries—an upshot of which, he acknowledged, is that CNN docs increasingly “step on some vested interests, and they do respond.”

Sure enough, over the past year, CNN documentaries have riled up everyone from media watchdog types to conservative political operatives to MSNBC’s Dan Abrams to professional wrestlers. Mr. Klein suggested that he wouldn’t shy away from the hostile attention in the years to come—and suggested it probably does the network as much good as harm.

“What I love is when our competitors then turn that into segments on their shows,” said Mr. Klein. “They have nothing else to talk about other than who has CNN pissed off today. That’s great. We’ll provide fodder for their programming, as long as they get our initials right.”

See, as long as CNN is getting attention, its president doesn’t care what it gets attention for. The content of his programs is of interest to him only to the extent that it garners attention. Whether the subject is World War Three or Anna Nicole Smith doesn’t matter to him. Is he ashamed to admit it? Fuggedaboudit! He loves it! And he’s signed on for four more years!

Here’s his picture for your dartboard:

Those who can, teach:

That’s 71-year-old professor Walter H. G. Lewin teaching a physics class at MIT. You can take his class online, at MIT’s OpenCourseWare, which the online version of the New York Times article from which I learned this doesn’t even bother to link to, because the online folks at the NYT are obviously retards.

“We have here the mother of all pendulums!” he declares, hoisting his 6-foot-2, 170-pound self on a 30-pound steel ball attached to a pendulum hanging from the ceiling. He swings across the stage, holding himself nearly horizontal as his hair blows in the breeze he created.

The point: that a period of a pendulum is independent of the mass — the steel ball, plus one professor — hanging from it.

“Physics works!” Professor Lewin shouts, as the classroom explodes in cheers.

The strongest praise comes from an Iraqi physics teacher:

A fan who said he was a physics teacher from Iraq gushed: “You are now my Scientific Father. In spite of the bad occupation and war against my lovely IRAQ, you made me love USA because you are there and MIT is there.”

More about OpenCourseWare here.

Having fun yet, Hillary?

ETP explains:

Contrary to the insistence of their respective publicists, it looks like the gloves are off between former President Bill Clinton and his longtime political supporter and good friend, supermarket magnate Ron Burkle.

Less than a week after The Huffington Post first reported that the former President was severing his business ties with the California billionaire, Radar Magazine has published a derisive rogue’s gallery Tuesday of what it called the “Funky All-Stars” of the Clinton years.

First we hear about Hillary’s unlovely brothers:

Beneath a less-than-flattering photo of Hillary’s brother Hugh Rodham, Radar’s Amber Sutherland writes that Rodham “couldn’t capitalize on the Billary machine well enough to win the senate seat in Florida.” Rodham’s radio show “was a bomb,” she continues, and he later was caught “essentially selling presidential pardons.”

Readers are also reminded that Hillary’s other brother, Tony Rodham, is “a college dropout who went on to work as a repo man in the Chicago projects” and who later “became a friend and admirer of human-rights-violating, lesbian-daughter-disowning Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen.” Radar also chides Tony Rodham for his own involvement in seeking presidential pardons for friends.

Then we get to hear all about Bill’s former flames.

I am not a politico, so I am unmoved. It has always been thus.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the John Edwards Love Child Scandal. It’s sordid and tawdry, and could well be true. The National Enquirer has pretty good news chops, as Jack Shafer noted a few years ago.

Kaus says:

What to expect when you’re expecting: Drudge teases the National Enquirer … Update: The Enquirer posts the gist….. One initial point: There’s no reason to conclude this story was planted by one campaign or another. I’m familiar with how the initial Rielle Hunter/Edwards rumors, true or not, got to at least one news outlet–and no campaigns, Dem or GOP, were involved. It was a story going around–I’d been hearing it for months. Not all rumors are plants. And some are true. Even in the Enquirer. ..

Yep. And yuck.

Me, I’m wondering if this is the rumor Ron Rosenbaum heard a while back, and wrote about here and here.

Rupert Everett unloads on Hollywood:

“De Niro, Redford, Keaton, Allen, Pacino … They’re all just tragic parodies of themselves,” he says. “Al Pacino looks like a mad old freak now. I say give it a rest, or go and do some serious stuff.” …

“The other day I saw a film called Because I Said So with Diane Keaton, and I thought, ‘here’s one of the women we loved most in 1970s cinema, debasing and humiliating herself in this load of trash’.

“Why? Because we’re sheep, we just follow the herd … It’s just part of the huge amount of product that’s put out now that’s really bad. And it’s our fault. We’re all responsible for how the culture is.

Hollywood’s denizens responsible for the culture? What a thought! But never fear. The future looks rosy, Everett says:

Clooney the man? “He’s not the brightest spark on the boulevard. He’ll be president one day. Mark my words, if he’s straight, he’ll be president.”