By Tim Cuprisin Media Columnist Published Nov 17, 2009 at 11:00 AM

Whether or not she ever runs for president, Sarah Palin is likely to be a permanent fixture on American television screens.

The current media tour to sell her book, "Going Rogue," which began Monday on Oprah Winfrey's syndicated talk show, demonstrates her ease on camera.

There's an underlying defensiveness that Palin needs to work on, but it's not difficult to see her hosting some sort of show.

As her hour with Palin ended, Winfrey asked about that very possibility.

"Should I be worried because I have heard that you're going to get your own talk show?" she asked, eliciting giggles from the former Alaska governor. "C'mon."

"Oprah, you are the queen of talk shows," answered Palin. "There's nothing to ever worry about."

In fact, Palin said she was "quite inspired" by Winfrey. 

And there are things she can still learn from the queen.

Winfrey can be as defensive as Palin. After I wrote a column a few years ago criticizing the emotions unleashed by giving out gifts to guests on a "favorite things" show, Winfrey called me and suggested I was a "Scrooge."

In the following years, she did scale back the orgy of materialism she unleashed on those giveaway shows, not because of anything I wrote. But because she clearly thinks deeply about what she puts on television. 

One factor in the success of Oprah Winfrey over the years is that ability to change.

Palin has been on our TV screens -- really the only way we come to know public figures -- for little more than a year. She's still fighting battles from last year with Katie Couric and others who raised tough questions.

If she can learn to let things go and move on, there's a naturalness in Palin that could work well on the small screen.

Bader back on the air: Radio talker Jerry Bader is back on Green Bay's WTAQ-AM after a two-week suspension for pushing scurrilous rumors about Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton's decision to drop out of the race for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

In Monday's return to the station, where he has the 8:30 to 11 a.m. shift, Bader took responsibility for his comments, and apologized again.

On TV: Time Warner Cable's Bev Greenberg is retiring at the end of the year as vice president of communications and regional local programming after nearly 20 years with the company. She's been the most visible face of the cable company that serves a majority of southeast Wisconsin households.

  • If you think there's a White House boycott of Fox News Channel, think again. The president is scheduled to do a 10-minute interview today with Fox's Major Garrett.
  • Speaking of Fox News Channel, Lou Dobbs was on it Monday night, telling Bill O'Reilly this about his old employer, CNN: "What I heard very directly was that they had decided to take CNN in a direction in which advocacy journalism ... wouldn't be a part of it." With  straight-arrow reporter John King named to replace him in the 6 p.m. slot, that sounds about right.
  • CBS is flipping fading "Cold Case" and the weak new "Three Rivers" this Sunday night, starting "Cold Case" at 8 p.m. on Channel 58.
  • The CW will run a marathon of 10 episodes of its "Vampire Diaries" the week of Dec. 14, filling the entire Monday to Friday network schedule.
  • The New York Times says a deal has been signed to keep WWE's "Monday Night Raw" wrestling on USA through 2014.
  • The hilarious Neil Patrick Harris is actually on Twitter. He's @actuallyNPH. He's tweeted three times since signing on Monday and attracted 47,000 followers.

Kramer and Michael Richards: Sunday night's penultimate installment of HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" featured rehearsals for this season's fictional "Seinfeld" reunion, a funny and nostalgic exercise that could actually work.

But the best part of last weekend's episode centered on Michael "Kramer" Richards and his fears about the fictitious "Groat's Syndrome" that he'd been diagnosed with. It allowed him to play off the incident at a comedy club a few years ago that caught headlines and did not favors for his career.

This brief "Curb" season wraps up Sunday night at 8 on HBO.

A bit of video from last Sunday's episode follows below.

Tim Cuprisin Media Columnist

Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.

A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.

In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.

When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.