CNN

Anderson Cooper was on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” this week, and the CNN anchor talked about his infamous giggle fits during the “Ridiculist” segments. “It’s always one little thing that trips you up,” Cooper said. Watch:

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There were a pair of big interviews on cable news this week, both of the very different in both tone and content.

As we noted, CNN secured the first TV interview with Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng, who told Anderson Cooper “I didn’t see much hope” while being detained by Chinese authorities:

On MSNBC, Chris Matthews had a sometimes contentious, often funny interview with former GOP Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. Among the revelations: his favorite snake is a python:

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Andy Cohen will appear on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” tomorrow, and the Bravo executive vice president reveals in the interview he is a big fan of “State of the Union” anchor Candy Crowley.

Before the interview was taped, a CNN producer who knew Cohen was a fan of Crowley’s presented him with a signed bookmark in the shape of the CNN chief political correspondent (pictured, if you look very closely, in Cohen’s Bravo Clubhouse).

“Here’s my book, Most Talkative, and my little bookmark is Candy Crowley, who I love,” Cohen told host Howard Kurtz. “She wrote: ‘To Andy, from a not so real housewife, Candy Crowley.’ So she kind of stands halfway in my book.”

As we noted, CNBC anchors remembered their friend and colleague Mark Haines yesterday. Haines died unexpectedly a year ago.

On her CNN program, Erin Burnett, who spent more than five years next to Haines at the CNBC anchor desk, delivered a heartfelt remembrance of her former colleague:

Late last year, you may recall that a CNN International crew, along with actor Christian Bale, were roughed up by Chinese police after trying to visit detained Chinese human rights activist Chen Guangcheng. Earlier this month, while reporting on his escape from custody and subsequent discussions with U.S. officials, CNN ended up being blocked in China.

The network’s dedication to the story is paying off, as it has secured the first TV interview with Chen since arrived in the U.S. last week. Anderson Cooper interviewed Chen this afternoon (pictured), and the story will run tonight on “AC360″ and on CNN International.

Today on mediabistro.com, we ask Lola Ogunnaike, a contributor for the “Today” show and MSNBC, “So What Do You Do?” Ogunnaike talks about her experience as a freelance journalist and former CNN correspondent, as well as how she got into television in the first place:

How would you describe your time on American Morning at CNN?
The hours were absolutely brutal. You hear about people like the Matt Lauers and Katie Courics of the world making astronomical amounts of money — they completely deserve it because waking up at the crack of dawn is no joke. The show would begin at 6 a.m. and end at 9 a.m., which means we often had to be in the building by 4-4:30 a.m. And if you were turning a story for the next day, you essentially work anywhere between 12-15 hours. With that said, it was a thrilling experience and I met some of the funniest and most entertaining people that I’ve ever had the chance to work with. CNN was definitely a blast.

How much would you credit your 2006 suspension from The New York Times for jump-starting your TV career? Read more

“There will be changes.”

It was broadcast upfront week, and amid the chaos and the talk of CBS’s schedule and the fate of “30 Rock,” the discussion had shifted to CNN. A media buyer for one of the top firms told me that in a conversation with a senior executive at Time Warner, there was an expectation that CNN would be tweaking its programming, an effort to combat ratings fatigue.

In a terse statement earlier this month, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said that he and others at the company were “clearly not satisfied” with CNN’s situation, and promised that action would be taken to rectify it.

That situation–at least in the primetime ratings–is grim. Last week the channel had its lowest weekly primetime in total viewers in at least 20 years, and it did not do much better in the adults 25-54 demo that cable news actually sells against. May sweeps and the NBA playoffs probably had something to do with that, but sweeps aren’t enough to explain a 20-year low. Unless an unexpected news event happens, it will likely end up being another rough month for CNN ratings-wise when the final numbers come in next Tuesday.

“Obviously this is an indictment of their lineup, it is not working,” says Brad Adgate, senior VP of research at Horizon Media.

Adgate, who used to work in the research department at CNN and Turner,  says that for a political year ratings across cable news have been relatively flat. CNN saw ratings boosts earlier this year, when there were debates and primaries, but since then things have quieted down. TV viewers that are interested in the day-to-day political scuffles are almost by definition going to be partisan, and there are cable news channels tailored just for them.

“It was the first news network, it does have a great reputation and a great global brand name for the casual news viewer, but those aren’t the people who are going to watch debt news on a regular basis,” Adgate says. “The news is still the star at CNN and it isn’t necessarily the star at other cable news networks.”

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CNN’s Wolf Blitzer will interview with Afghan President Hamid Karzai this afternoon. Karzai is in the U.S. to attend the NATO Summit in Chicago.

Karzai met with President Obama yesterday (pictured). NATO countries are expected to sign off today on Obama’s exit strategy from Afghanistan, which calls for the withdrawal of U.S. troops by the end of 2014.

The interview is slated to air today in the 5pmET hour of “The Situation Room,” which Blitzer is anchoring from Chicago. It is Karzai’s only scheduled interview during his trip to the U.S.

File this story under “weird.” Former CNN political director and CNN Headline News president Bob Furnad was busted by a local CBS affiliate in Atlanta placing dog poop in his neighbor’s mailbox. Apparently there was some sort of ongoing feud between Furnad and his neighbors, who caught him, er, brown-handed on surveillance footage.

WATCH:

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What a week for anomalous ratings days! Earlier this week, we noted that CNN’s Piers Morgan saw only 39,000 demo viewers on Tuesday night, way down from his average, and a record-low for CNN. Last night, Morgan was back up to a more typical 175,000 demo viewers, but the drama was on MSNBC and Fox News.

At 10 PM, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell topped FNC’s Greta Van Susteren in the demo. It wasn’t by that much, but it was a clean win for O’Donnell, and clean ratings wins over Fox News (when there aren’t any big news events or specials) are an unusual thing.

O’Donnell averaged 327,000 demo viewers, to Van Susteren’s 309,000. In total viewers, Van Susteren still handily topped O’Donnell by around 500,000 viewers, but a demo win is still a win. CNN’s Anderson Cooper averaged 143,000 demo viewers, about average for him.