My fight with CNN

Did I tell you I had a bit of nastiness with CNN? More specifically, I wrote them a nasty letter about their coverage of The Annotated Spitzer and they wrote me an apology. Which I suppose is great, but I bet you won't see me on CNN anytime soon.

A portion of my letter went like this:

What really bothers me came later in the piece when Ms. Brown started talking about me taking the painting on a tour, ending up at room 871 of the Mayflower. At which point several things occurred to me:

I realized that the language in that portion of the segment was taken directly from, and without any credit being given to, Dealbreaker.com and its coverage of the painting. The copy from that piece ran, in part:

He'll be displaying it in front the stock exchange for the next week, before going on a tour that'll retrace Kirsten's steps from New York to DC, (hopefully) culminating in an exhibition in Mayflower room 871, which, interestingly enough, has yet to be cleaned.

This is the humorous ranting of a highly popular Wall Street blog. IT IS COMPLETELY FALSE.

As for Dealbreaker, I love reading it. I love that they have said some wonderful things about me in the past, some nasty things and some completely false things. Anybody who reads it regularly can tell the difference between all three categories. I'm a big fan.

CNN, however, is a completely different beast. Or one would at least like to think so. Surely whoever wrote that copy should have verified it in some manner, particularly knowing it came from a blog. Mr. [redacted], you know from personal experience that I am easy enough to reach and that I reply to inquiries quickly. Yet you guys just picked it up off the web and ran with it as if it were fact.

A part of their letter went like:

While we don’t believe the story reported anything that is in any way damaging to you, we will accept that the line about the “tour” was not accurate.
We apologize for any confusion that may have been caused.

Which I thought was nice enough. I mean, I take enough shit from Dealbreaker; you'd think I wouldn't have to get it from CNN as well.

I wrote a squishy note back accepting the apology.