CNN’s Jack Cafferty Charged with DUI After Hitting Biker

Two drunks on CNN = Qualified Commentators?

CNN Anchor Admits Leaving Scene Of Accident (Oops!); Jack Cafferty Pleads Guilty
WNBC-TV New York ^ | 8.5.03

Posted on Tuesday, August 05, 2003 2:50:31 PM by mhking

NEW YORK — CNN anchor Jack Cafferty will pay a $250 fine and perform 70 hours of community service after pleading guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Cafferty had been charged with the traffic infraction, along with misdemeanor charges of reckless driving, assault and harassment, after police said he knocked a man off a bike with his Cadillac on May 14.

A traffic officer and about five pedestrians ran after Cafferty’s car to stop him after the accident, but Cafferty drove through at least two red lights and around other vehicles without stopping, according to a police complaint.

Cafferty was dragging the man’s bike underneath his car, police said.

Cafferty later told police that he had seen a man on a bike who may have been a messenger weaving in and out of traffic as Cafferty drove south along Ninth Avenue around 10:25 a.m. When Cafferty looked in his mirror, he saw the man getting up off the ground but was unaware he had hit the bicyclist, the anchor told police.

The bicyclist, Billy Maldonado, told police he was slightly injured.

“This was never anything more than a traffic incident. It was resolved as a traffic infraction. Jack acted responsibly in this, as he always has,” said Cafferty’s attorney, Seth Rosenberg.

CNN Reporter Rick Sanchez Charged w/ DUI After Hitting Pedestrian

So these are the qualifications to be a CNN commentator?

Anchorman charged with DUI
[CITY Edition]
St. Petersburg Times – St. Petersburg, Fla.
Date: Feb 17, 1991
Start Page: 9.B
Section: TAMPA BAY AND STATE
Text Word Count: 199
Document Text

A Miami television anchorman has been charged with driving under the influence of alcohol in a December accident in which police say he left the scene after hitting a man and returned later.

Rick Sanchez, anchor for WSVN, was charged Friday with one count of DUI, a first-degree misdemeanor in the Dec. 10 accident outside Joe Robbie Stadium, prosecutor Kathleen Hoague said.

If convicted, Sanchez faces a maximum of six months in prison and a $500 fine.

A blood test showed Sanchez had a blood-alcohol level that night of .15 percent. A person with a .10 level is considered legally drunk in Florida.

The man Sanchez hit was critically injured and remains in a coma at North Shore Hospital.

Ms. Hoague said Friday that she thinks Sanchez was driving drunk at the time of the accident, but prosecutors decided not to charge him with causing bodily injury while driving drunk, a third-degree felony.

“The victim came out of nowhere and walked right into his pathway,” she said. “Sanchez was not speeding and would not have been able to avoid the accident.”

After the accident, Sanchez, 32, drove home to retrieve his driver’s license and insurance card.

Credit: Associated Press

CNN Correspondent Now the Communist Candidate in El Salvador

The presidential candidate [1] of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the communist revolutionaries in El Salvador the Reagan administration battled in the 1980s, is, a Monday Washington Post story noted, “a former correspondent for CNN en Espanol [2].” In the March 9 article, “In El Salvador Vote, Big Opportunity for Leftists [3],” reporter William Booth relayed from San Salvador that the journalist-turned-politician “considers himself to be El Salvador’s Barack Obama.” Booth relayed:

After a 12-year civil war and a peace undermined by soaring crime, leftists in El Salvador are on the verge of completing a remarkable journey from armed struggle to the presidential palace.

Their candidate is a veteran TV broadcaster and morning talk show host, Mauricio Funes [4], whose Facebook page [5] lists his political views as “other.” Funes, 49, a former correspondent for CNN en Español, was recently recruited by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), the revolutionary group-turned-mainstream political party that is favored by polls to win the presidency in a vote scheduled for March 15….

Funes considers himself to be El Salvador’s Barack Obama — an agent of change in a country beset by the highest murder rate in Latin America and an economy in free fall.

The comparison is overt: Funes and the FMLN use images of Obama in their ads (despite objections by the U.S. State Department), saying both candidates were smeared by their opponents as allies of extremists. The FMLN television spots complete the link by employing the Obama slogan in English and Spanish, vowing “Yes, we can!”…