Jennifer Granholm: What I Read

Michigan's former governor talks Tosh.O, right-wing radio, and her favorite 22-year-old blogger.

How do people deal with the torrent of information pouring down on us all? What sources can't they live without? We regularly reach out to prominent figures in media, entertainment, politics, the arts and the literary world, to hear their answers. This is drawn from a conversation with Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan and host of Current TV's The War Room.

I get up at 5:30 a.m., sit down at my computer and watch downloaded clips of Morning Joe. When it's breakfast time, I move on to The New York Times. I live on the West Coast now so I've got an East Coast booker sending me morning news clips and a news junkie in Michigan who sends me clips from there. Since I have a special love for the state, I have a national set of clips and a Michigan set of clips.

By 8:30 a.m., I'm in the office and I start pulling up my websites like The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, Jezebel, Talking Points Memo and Politico, where I write a column. I'm really liking BuzzFeed. Not so much the for the puppy and kitten videos but the fact that 22-year-old Andrew Kaczynksi can find YouTube videos of presidential candidates that no one else has found before is fantastic. I love it. But aside from political coverage, they do have some of the very best video uploads, like Anderson Cooper's Dyngus Day giggle fit.

I like Jezebel because it's so edgy and fun. They are just wild and it's a good window into what younger women are thinking. With the whole "War on Women" it's good to have a view from the ground. I like HuffPo because it positions the news front-and-center. Nobody has better headlines. You can see by the number of comments how interesting the story is. And the right hand column is a bit of a guilty pleasure. I'm not looking at the beach pics so much but the supply of celebrity news at least keeps me au courant without having to read People magazine.

I'm also looking at progressive media like Slate, Mother Jones and Think Progress. For Michigan news, I read MLive and The Detroit Free Press constantly. I rarely get a chance to look at the traditional media that is delivered to my home other than The New York Times but I will flip through our subscriptions to Runner's World, The Week, Fortune and Time.

My favorite journalists are Christiane Amanpour, Maria Bartiromo, Rachel Maddow and the person everyone looks up to, Tim Russert, God rest his soul. I admire them all but I don't really even pretend to be a journalist myself. I'm just an ex-governor hosting a show with an opinion. One of the challenges for me, that traditional journalists don't really have, is interviewing people whom I agree with.  People know I'm a Democrat and I'm not going to hide what I believe. So playing devil's advocate is a little difficult.

If I had to name people I don't like, I'd say Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin. It's that breed of real toxic-spewers who are really damaging to our discourse. I'd be embarrassed to have my mom or dad listen to them. I don't think they shouldn't be on the radio but when the rhetoric inflames and exaggerates to the point of lacking integrity, that bothers me.

For TV, we'll tape The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and if I'm lucky we'll catch one of those. My son makes me watch Tosh.0, which is totally, 100 percent inappropriate, constantly. Other than that, we love Modern Family.