This Just In: Actual Emotion Breaks Out on CNN! Mass Confusion Ensues!

Jack Cafferty is a beautiful thing in the age of cable news -- a crank, a grouch, a guy whose beans are permanently steamed. CNN has never quite known how to position the grumpy Cafferty in its constellation of twinkly-eyed feel-gooders, and has doomed him to live out his contract uselessly unleashing his ire on randomly-selected stories of the day: "Should battered spouses be allowed to carry guns? Email caffertyfile at CNN.com." (The anchor who responds to viewer emails is more or less the TV news equivalent of the desperate lounge singer who moves into the audience and starts shaking the patrons' hands.)

Yesterday, though, Cafferty found some prey he could really get his incisors into -- the network itself. Returning to the studio after two hours' wall-to-wall coverage of the BTK sentencing, the net went to its current poster boy, the drama-hyping Wolf Blitzer ("You are. IN... thesituationroom"), and then to Cafferty, who is nobody's idea of a poster boy for anything except possibly spleen. And splenetic he was, and gloriously so. "We ought to be ashamed of ourselves" for turning hours of network air over to the proceedings, he sputtered at Blitzer. Blitzer's instincts are second to no one's when it comes to pimping a dramatic story, and he tried to get Cafferty to admit that at least the BTK spectacle was one that viewers have an interest in. This is precisely the sort of responsibility-evading argument that has always justified coverage of questionable news by outlets that ought to know better. Cafferty, who spent more than 30 years in local news before joining CNN and has seen his share of this sort of thing, wasn't biting:

That's got nothing to do with anything, Wolf, as far as I'm concerned. This is a ghoulish exercise on the part of the news media and if ratings are the reason, then I'll say it again, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.... It's nonsense. It doesn't belong on television. Nobody needs to watch this stuff. All it does is inspire other nut cases out there that maybe they can get themselves famous by doing this kind of -- it's terrible and I don't care how many people were watching.

You could practically see Blitzer's world collapsing like a flan in the sun. ("Thinking: Independent. Attitude: Angry. Must... throw to commercial.") It's probably wishful thinking to say that I felt a tremor in the Force at that moment, a crack in the edifice of strained jokes and gooey fake empathy that defines cable news at this unfortunate moment. Maybe it was just the tonic sight of somebody with actual news instincts expressing true frustration and outrage. Not the kind you gin up for ratings over something sensational like the performance of the Aruban police; the kind you feel innately about something close to your heart, like the plummeting standards of your troubled profession.  Viewers may differ on the appropriateness of Cafferty biting the hand that feeds him on the air that gives him an outlet. Nobody who saw it can claim it wasn't bracingly sincere.