CNN president calls news judgment 'elitist'

During an interview on the May 6 edition of WNYC's On the Media, Brooke Gladstone repeatedly asked CNN President Jonathan Klein to justify the network's overwhelming coverage of the so-called 'runaway bride' incident. The conversation included the following exchange:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It seems to me that, for the purposes of our discussion, you keep equating stories like Lebanon, which need no justification, with a weird little blip of a story like the runaway bride, which actually does need some justification.

JONATHAN KLEIN: Well, and yet, that's possibly a pretty elitist thing to say, because I don't know that you can say that one story needs justification, one doesn't. Who are you to argue with "the people" who flock to watch one story and not the other?

I guess that tells us how CNN makes coverage decision these days, huh?