CORRECTION: Ahh, the pitfalls of technology. In the post below, I wrote about an ad that kept running Sunday morning on CNN, which I watched in the background as I scribbled away at my office. Several times, I heard an ad for Anderson Cooper’s show that included a woman’s voice talking about being a “lifelong Democrat” and watching Cooper because he called out the “right wing.” But that’s not the whole story. I was told Monday by CNN that I only heard half the ad, which was dubbed in stereo. (Apparently my television is mono.) The other half of the ad had a male voice saying he was a Republican who turns to Anderson Cooper because he holds accountable “left wing politicians.” The two voices are recorded to be talking over each other, reaffirming CNN’s place in the center of the cable news spectrum. This makes my subsequent analysis largely wrong. Cooper was not signaling a shift to cater to a left-wing audience. He was signaling that he wanted both a left-wing and a right-wing audiences at the same time. The CNN dream of post-partisanship, in other words, is still alive. This still speaks to the degree to which cable news viewers are polarized–potential viewers are either left wing or right wing–but not in the way I initially described. After the jump, I have posted the transcript of the two versions of the ad, which CNN sent me. My apologies for the mistake.

The original blog post with transcript after the jump.