Coming out of a commercial break at 8:40 AM eastern time today, during Randi Kaye’s shift on CNN, the network “unexpectedly” chose to play the refrain from the song “Stupid Girls” by the pop singer Pink going into a story about former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. The two word refrain repeated over and over as the camera panned past Ms. Kaye and faded into a picture of Palin visiting a Chic-fil-A restaurant. The host then went on to a fairly stock story about the recent Chic-fil-A brouhaha, including Palin’s visit, with no reference to the introductory tune.

For the record, it’s my understanding that the hosts of these shows on the 24 hour cable news channels generally have nothing to do with the selection of the bumper music. That’s usually handled by the production staff, and a specific individual is frequently assigned to do nothing but select the musical cuts. CNN can – and probably will – easily say that it was all a coincidence and it might be hard to prove otherwise. (EDIT: See update.)

This is, however, kind of reminiscent of that rapidly exploding moment when the house band on Jimmy Fallon’s show played a derogatory song clip as then presidential candidate Michele Bachmann was coming on stage. Fallon later had to apologize. It makes one wonder if these networks ever manage to learn anything from the past.

After chatting with Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters about it, he came up with the video, which follows.

UPDATE: (Jazz) There seems to be some confusion over the portion where I mention that the anchor generally doesn’t pick the bumper music. This was not intended as any sort of indicator that malice aforethought was ruled out. Simply saying that if it was intentional, it was mostly likely pulled off by the producers and the crew. These anchors are really little more than actors in many cases, coming in to work and reading whatever shows up on the teleprompter.