CNN Black Eye: No Black Anchors. Why: Flop "might set back the cause."

CNN Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz interviews his new boss, half-black Mark Whitaker: "In this cable environment, I have to ask you, why is it that after 6:00 at night, with the exception now Al Sharpton on MSNBC - and of course, he's not a journalist but an activist - are there no African-American anchors?"

Mark Whitaker: "Well, I mean, it's not for lack of desire. I mean, I'm a big - one of the things I said to Jim Walton, who's, you know, the president here at CNN when he first talked to me about coming here, I said, you know, I think there are going to be tremendous benefits to the first cable network or really any cable network I think who finds, you know, a diverse anchor, black anchor or a Hispanic anchor, given the changing demographics of this country, who is really a huge success in prime time."

"First of all, I think it's important that that person - I would think certainly that's going to be on CNN - be a huge success, because I think that, unfortunately - and this may not be fair - but that if, you know, that were to happen and were to turn out well, as frankly a lot of these shows don't, I think it would be - you know, it wouldn't - you know, it might sort of set back the cause." 

Huh? 

Whitaker might have been off his game following Kurtz's previous line of questioning:  why Newsweek didn't run with the Bill Clinton 1998 sex scandal exclusive exhaustively reported by Newsweek's intrepid Michael Isikoff. 

Howard went into Monica Lewinsky after devoting half his CNN Sunday media show to Politico's Herman Cain sexual harassment gossip.

90 Politico stories in five days.  Defensive Jonathan Martin to Kurtz:  "Well, that number includes blog posts so it's not really honest."


Howard: One of the most famous or infamous decisions you made - you were filling in as editor at the time - was in the Monica Lewinsky story. Mike Isikoff basically had the goods or at least it looked that way later. The thing I never understood about the decision to hold the story that, of course, you tried to get wind of it and the "Washington Post" broke it, is that you had confirmed that Ken Starr, independent prosecutor, was investigating this. 

Mark Whitaker: Right. Right.

Howard: Why wasn't that enough to go on? Well, I'm sure you've asked yourself this a hundred times.

Whitaker: Right, right, right, right. Well, a couple things - is that Mike knew a lot. It wasn't like Woodward and Bernstein writing a little piece where they only knew about Starr.  He knew a lot about it, but he had never met Lewinsky herself. All of his sources were sort of around her. So we didn't know, you know, just how credible she was. And by the time - when Starr had her, you know, basically under protective custody to sort of, you know, question her, we couldn't get to her.

The other thing which we didn't talk about at the time but I talk about in the book [Whitaker was on Kurtz's show pimping his book]  is I had stepped in for Maynard Parker, who was undergoing treatment for cancer at the time.  Maynard had been aware for almost a year that Mike was working on this story, but he had never told me, and he hadn't told Rick Smith, who was the publisher. He hadn't told Don Graham. So -

Howard: You were parachuting into this -

Whitaker: So we only found out about any of this two days before we had to make a decision whether to publish or not. So there was a lot of - during those two days, a lot of discussions and examination going back to the sources, trying to get extra information from them. But frankly, we didn't feel by - from Thursday to that Saturday that we were on firm enough ground to report a story that wouldn't just be a story about Ken Starr that ultimately would be about accusing the president of having sex in the Oval Office with an intern, which was, if we had gotten that wrong could have been, you know - could have been a mortal blow to "Newsweek's" reputation.

Howard zeros in on Whitaker's self-preservation: The potential down side must have loomed very large.  After "Newsweek," you went to NBC.* And you came here to CNN.

After Newsweek spiked Mike's story, the frustrated Isikoff leaked the Lewinsky thing to Matt Drudge.  Newsweek's sister pub, Wash Post, jumped on the scandal. And the rest was history.

Related:  TV news critic Gail Shister hammers NBC's Brian Williams vehicle Rock Center.

*Whitaker, disdained in some quarters as an empty suit, succeeded NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert.