Fareed Zakaria GPS: Your opinion…

I finally got to catch Fareed Zakaria GPS for the first time this weekend. About halfway through the interview with Condoleeza Rice I started getting the feeling that this interview had been edited because of the way Rice would finish her sentence and almost instantlaneously Zakaria would ask the next question; and I mean instantaneously and not after a delay of a second or so, except for the space between their final exchange which had what I would consider a “natural” pause one would normally expect from an interivew.

Here’s the question: If it was edited, was the interview edited for content or time? And, if there are parts of the interview on the cutting room floor, will they be made available? NBC recently caught a lot of flack for editing an interview with President Bush (unfounded flack if you ask me) but they did make the entire interview available online.

The second part of the program featured a roundtable headed by Zakaria. What made Fareed Zakaria GPS’ roundtable interesting was 3/4 of the table was comprised of folks I wouldn’t necessarily classify as part of the usual suspects of punditry (Christiane Amanpour would have been the only real “ringer”). Two of those people I had never heard of before. One I had seen a few times over the years but wasn’t someone would qualify as a regular pundit. But they all appeared very knowledgable, weather you agree with them ideologically or not. Their freshness is what made the segment really work for me. I skimmed a couple of the previous roundtables on the CNN website and found that the international expert/”pundit newbie” angle was present there as well, though sometimes counterbalanced by experts that have made the pundit rounds more often (Douglas Feith, for example). I encourage Zakaria to continue on this course and bring fresh voices on the program as a welcome alternative to what has become a chronically stale Sunday pundit class on the weekend programs on all the networks, broadcast and cable. Yes, it might be a tad too intellectual for some but it’s a nice change of pace for people like me who have become able predict what most pundits are going to say before they say it because they’ve been on so often.

Setting aside the possible open question of editing, the one thing that really rubs me wrong about this program is unfortunately the show’s title. Fareed Zakaria GPS? What on earth is that supposed to mean? Zakaria is a Global Positioning System? Zakaria can get me from point A to point B? Do I need to download an update from the web first before I watch? Beats the heck out of me. And there’s nothing on the show’s website to clear the air.

At least Anderson Cooper 360 has been defined in a way that makes sense from a branding perspective; they say it’s a show that covers “all the angles”. But I’m at a loss how this show ties in to a GPS. Whoever dreamed up this title should be bopped on the head. I rank it right up there with the worst show titles ever; Summer Sunday USA, Watch It! (sorry Chris), The Most, and The Pulse.

What’s your opinion of this new Sunday CNN program?