Well, say what you will about CNN, you can’t say they’re inconsistent. Once they got busted for planting questions from Democratic political activists at the last Democratic debate, it looks like the figured they’d better do the same for the Republican debate. And so they did – exactly the same.
CNN’s excuse during the Democratic debates was that the questioners could very well have been undecided Democratic voters. It’s not unusual for issue activists to be undecided for quite a while as they wait for the candidates to come to rest on their particular issue. There’s no way they could use that excuse last night. No one expects a man on a Hillary Clinton campaign steering committee to suddenly see the light during a Republican debate. Ditto for someone who shills for a labor union that’s already publicly backing John Edwards. If these folks were undecided voters, they certainly were not undecided about the party of the candidate they’d be supporting.
That said, I don’t think that this was done maliciously or purposefully. I think it’s a perfect example of why we need ideological diversity in our MSM newsrooms. I’m pretty sure that the folks picking the questions thought they had a good crop, probably even questions that the deciders would have asked themselves. Had there been someone there who was even remotely conservative, though, they might well have seen how slanted many of the questions were and could have pointed that out to the rest of the group. Had there been someone of a different ideological stripe, they might have been able to explain why an animated Dick Cheney growling “I’m watching you” isn’t as funny to a Republican audience as Anderson Cooper thought it was.
CNN does have a chance to even things out a bit, though, at the next YouTube Jamboree. I suggest they bring in a question from Michael Yon, who has spent months and months reporting from the ground in Iraq asking why the Democrats are so intent on abandoning the Iraqis in the face of indisputable bottom-up political progress. They could, perhaps, bring in a question from Michelle Malkin about the Fort Huachuca plot and the Islamists who are apparently paying drug cartels to bring them over a largely undefended border. I’m sure that Mary Katharine Ham or the guys over at Hot Air could come up with a couple substantive questions. So there’s a chance for CNN to get some piercing questions to the Democratic candidates. Will they be combative and come from folks who wouldn’t vote for anyone on the stage? Well, sure, but why should that stop CNN now?
