Tuesday, August 05, 2008

John Edwards, David Letterman and That Top 10 List   [Byron York]

Several days ago, I posted a Top 10 list from the "Late Show with David Letterman" in which Letterman mentioned the John Edwards "love child" story.  The list was actually entitled "Top 10 Signs Barack Obama is Overconfident."  The first nine items were pretty unremarkable, but the Number One sign that Obama is overconfident was: "Been cruising for chicks with John Edwards."

I linked to the Top 10 list on the "Late Show" website, but not long after my item was posted, I got a number of emails telling me the list had disappeared from the site.  The suspicion was that the "Late Show" had pulled the controversial item.  I've been meaning to call CBS to find out, and today I finally got around to it.  A spokeswoman told me there was nothing unusual going on — the list, she said, was never actually aired, having been cut from the July 29 program because the rest of the show was running over time.  "It was edited out for time, and what happened was that the web guys put it up there before they got a list of the material that was edited out," the spokesman told me.  Once the web guys got the word, the list was taken down, in the same way that previous Top 10 lists that had been cut for time reasons were taken off the site.  But the spokesman assures me it will appear in an upcoming issue of the "Late Show" newsletter.

I posted my item on the morning of July 31, which was the day after the day after the show originally aired, and the Top 10 list was still up then.  So taking it down apparently took a while.  But that's the explanation.

08/05 04:05 PMShare