A Marriage Made in Heaven? Maybe not…

Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel writes about controversy stemming from the announcement of CNN teaming up with the Tea Party Express for a GOP debate…

CNN political director Sam Feist defended the partnership as an appropriate way of covering an important constituency of the Republican Party.

“You knew that in 2012 there had to be a tea party debate,” he said. “The tea party movement has become iconic for Republican politics. … So we thought that it’s the right time and right place to do it.”

He also pointed out that CNN has chronicled the tea party movement “very extensively” since soon after it arose in early 2009 in protest of what its activists saw as the fiscally reckless policies of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress.

Yet, MSNBC’s liberal anchor Keith Olbermann contended the move puts the lie to CNN’s effort to position itself as a more objective alternative to Fox and MSNBC and exposes an ongoing rightward drift.

“The alliance isn’t the problem. It’s the continuing pretense that CNN is neutral,” he wrote in an e-mail to POLITICO. “They’ve been hemorrhaging viewers not because they’re nonpartisan but because the viewers recognize they are arrogantly and condescendingly pretending to be.”