CNN host Soledad O'Brien and her panelists spent some time having a laugh over Rupert Murdoch's anti-Semitic Tweeting Tuesday morning.
"He's a little bit off his rocker," O'Brien said of the NewsCorp CEO. "It's awesome. I like that."
At one point, O'Brien read another tweet from Murdoch with faux-seriousness, intoning, "Petraeus resignation. Timing, everything suspicious. There has to be more to this story," before grouping Murdoch in with Jack Welch, who asserted, that President Barack Obama's administration ginned up unemployment figures earlier this year, and celebrity birther Donald Trump, who called for "revolution" in a post-electoral hissy-fit. leading panelist Howard Kurtz to call the trio "orange-haired billionaires for change."
But the three men's online ramblings, panelist Will Cain said, pointed to a larger feature of social interaction in the age of 140-character communication.
"Twitter is its own little world, where your personality is developed in a way that's almost completely independent of who you are," Cain said, noting that he wasn't forgiving the trio's pecadillos. "You can be someone wholly independent on Twitter that doesn't reflect who you are."
O'Brien instantly disagreed with Cain's assessment.
"I think people have no filter, and what you get is this unedited, not necessarily polite, maybe more real version [of someone]," she said. "They kind of clean up the 'real' when they know they're gonna be held accountable."
Watch O'Brien and her panel discuss Twitter and the open mic it gives multi-millionaires, as posted Wednesday by Mediaite, below.
