Last week The Mirror ran a Separated at Birth pairing CNN Chief Political Analyst Gloria Borger and Kardashian patriarch (soon to be co-matriarch) Bruce Jenner. His new name may soon be Belinda, but that cat’s not officially out of the bag. Even Breitbart‘s resident ethicist John Nolte was upset about it — he called it “mean” but eventually LOL’ed when I insisted it was a compliment to Jenner to look like a beautiful TV newswoman.
“Not only mean but untrue,” Nolte wrote on Twitter. “Gloria Borger might be a horrible journalist but she’s an attractive woman.”
[RELATED: Separated at Birth: CNN’s Gloria Borger]
CNN Director of Public Relations Jennifer Dargan, a Harvard grad, shot me an email asking if I’d consulted any of my LGBT friends before running it. “You don’t know any lgbt [sic] people who could have told you how insensitive this is?” she asked over email.
(Seriously, she asked me this. And it’s not that I don’t have any — I do — but I don’t comprehend why a Separated at Birth needs a focus group or why it should offend the LGBT community or anyone, really. The feature is not a statement on race, gender or sexuality. It’s simply my eyes and brain seeing similarities in images. In this case, Borger and Jenner have nearly identical hair hues and bobs. Clearly Dargan and Nolte have not seen the Separated at Birth I once did on MSNBC’s Al Sharpton and CNN contributor Alex Castellanos — one is black, the other is Hispanic. Or the one on Holly Petraeous (David’s wife), who I compared to Peppermint Patty and CNN contributor Newt Gingrich. Should I have consulted the Peanuts gang before running that one?)
I replied to Dargan, “Just out of curiosity, how is it offensive to the LGBT community to compare Bruce Jenner to a pretty CNN political analyst?”
The publicist did not respond.